"In learning you will teach, in teaching you will learn" - Phil Collins

Teaching has always been a matter of pride to me. It helps me spread knowledge of my expertise among the future set of professionals, it is like giving back to the society. I believe it is of a great benefit to the audience as well, as it helps them in understanding the current trends and developments in the industry.

University of Mumbai

I once read "To teach once is to learn twice". Until recently, I never really experienced it. Last week I took a session at the University of Mumbai. I began with a demonstration of ERPNext as a Open Source ERP that uses Python. I then spoke on Open Source and how Open source applications have changed the world. After this I introduced them to the Frappé Framework. I took a challenge from the participants to create a simple Library Management application in less than 30 minutes. 

Thirty Minutes later the participants were amazed by the framework capabilities!  

"If a 'doctype' is like a form why is it not called a form ?" questioned one of the student. Students come up with such smart questions, at times silly questions too. But it's these smart and silly questions that catches you off guard. Sharing ideas and discussions on those ideas in such sessions can prove to be beneficial to both the lecturer and the audience. This is also the best platform to receive out of the box ideas. 

Before I ended the session I gave a demo of 'Pranali', a software I developed for Rotaract District Organization in Mumbai using the Frappé framework. I shared my experience of how users across Mumbai thanked me for making the lives easier. I concluded the session by asking students to look around and try creating helpful applications for the society. A majority of them might not; but even if single student among 150 would develop one, the 2 hours I spend with these students would have a meaning in someone's lives.

Don Bosco Institute of Technology

Earlier this month I got a opportunity to conduct a session with the final year engineering students at Don Bosco Institute of Technology. My colleague Valmik and myself taught students Version control using Git. We did a practical session, made students write a simple program and then commit it. We then made them add new functions to their code. Made them revert a couple of times. Before we concluded the session we made them collaborate with each other. We divided the group into teams; each team was asked to code a particular function for a calculator. At the end the teams sent pull requests and merged the code into a single repository. The fun we had teaching them was a experience in itself.

We then presented them on how to explore repositories on GitHub, and explained them how they could contribute to other open source projects. The fact that they could even fix a bug and send in a pull request to NASA got them amazed!

Concluding Thoughts

I have often gotten into debates about - "freshers out of college lack industrial knowledge". It's not just their teachers responsibility to make sure they don't; It's also us professionals who need to make sure that they don't. Students love to hear from professionals. To conclude, find a school or college nearby, and volunteer to teach. You might inspire a next generation inventor.