Samsung held an Android Bootcamp for Samsung IT School students

As part of the Samsung Innovation Campus and the Samsung IT School, the annual practical Samsung Android Bootcamp 2023 took place. This BootCamp included a three-week course. At the end of it participants worked in teams and developed their own mobile applications. Schoolchildren from 12 Russian and Armenian cities, who are the students of Samsung IT School, joined this training. A total of 22 teams had their projects evaluated by experts.

A distinctive feature of this year’s Samsung Android BootCamp was the special attention paid to the formation of soft skills, along with the traditional immersion in software development. Thus, the first task of the BootCamp was to form project teams and organize work processes. During the first week, students wrote their resumes — they had to specify the role they wanted to play in the team, for example: team leader, Android developer, backend developer or UI/UX designer.

The second week of the BootCamp was devoted to team building: team leaders selected and invited participants to join their team based on their resumes. Those who didn’t choose team leadership as their role could also take the initiative and offer themselves as a team member of their favorite leader. There could be no more than four people in a team and no more than two people in a team from the Samsung IT School site.

During the third week, the teams took master classes from teachers and alumni of the program, who are professional mobile app developers at leading IT companies. Master classes covered both technical topics and teamwork, helping to prepare for the hackathon, which took place in the finals of the Samsung Android Bootcamp on April 15-16 in the Altair Technopark of RTU MIREA in Moscow. Participants from other cities joined the event online. In the finals, the teams had to present a concept of a mobile application that would necessarily have a client-server architecture and use various smartphone features, for example camera or geolocation.

The applications were evaluated by a jury consisting of workshop hosts and Dmitry Leonov, the director of the Altair Technopark. The winning teams of Samsung Android Bootcamp 2023:

• First place went to the team «sQUAD»: Vladislav Tomilov (MSTU Stankin), Alexander Zaitsev and Akim Glazunov (Samsung Technical Education Center), Vladislav Aksenov (NSTU Engineering Lyceum). As a result of coordinated teamwork, they were able to present a fully functional application «MaoMe». The idea of it is to save memories of bright and important moments in the user’s life, marking them on the map and attaching photos and comments to these marks.
• Second place went to the «Candelabra 2.0» team: Grigory Omelchuk and Vladislav Chuprin from Samsung Technical Education Center with the «Project Marketplace» app, which aims to help find investors for further partnerships.
• And on the third place went to the «Conquerors of Code» team, who made the «Pizza Planet» app. The authors Artem Lazarev (Ufa lyceum № 83), Vladislav Melnikov (VolgSTU), Alexander Osharov and Nikita Tropinin (Lyceum NRNU MEPhI) have developed a proposal for pizza fans who can find the perfect version of their favorite dish according to given criteria.

«This is the fourth year in a row that we have held BootCamps as part of the Samsung Innovation Campus. This year, the key theme of the BootCamp was the formation of highly demanded teamwork competencies in the IT industry. Students created teams, chose their role, learned to interact and build working processes. We received very positive feedback from the participants with high appreciation of the unique experience gained. I am sure that the practical skills of teamwork and other soft skills acquired by the students will be a significant addition to the unique skills of Samsung IT School graduates in building their future professional careers», commented Sergey Pevnev, Vice President of Samsung Electronics CIS headquarters.

Samsung IT School is a federal social and educational program to train future IT specialists, which is part of the Samsung Innovation Campus global initiative. The Samsung IT School program was twice awarded the national Runet Prize: as a separate project in the Science and Education category in 2016 and as part of the Samsung Innovation Campus in December 2021, in the Education and Human Resources category.

Every year about a thousand students from more than 50 cities in Russia get the opportunity to study mobile development at Samsung IT School. All graduates with their projects participate in the annual federal contest of mobile applications «IT School chooses the strongest!».

Samsung IT School has already opened enrollment for the 2023/2024 school year. High school and college students under the age of 17 are invited to participate in the program. To learn more about the project, apply for training and take tests, visit the Samsung IT School website.