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Regular version of the site

Summer School on Web Development

From June 29th to July 4th 2015, the Summer School on the basics of programming in Python was held in the HSE campus in St. Petersburg. The School was organized with support from SELS for first years students of the Department of Sociology.

For five days, the young sociologists were learning to create Web-based applications; create pages in HTML, apply styles and write the server-side logics for their applications. The students got acquainted with the technologies of the modern Internet and tried their hand as web developers, after obtaining basic skills in one of the fastest growing and most competitive areas in the labour market.

The goal of the Summer School was to teach students to create web sites which would contain the standard necessary elements of professional functionality, like news, comments and personal pages. Also they would contain elements of  advanced logics, like a news recommendation system that would consider user preferences, and a system for selecting interesting and useful comments.

Alina Bakhitova, 1st year, shares her impressions on the most interesting features of the Summer School:

 "I loved working on the page design, liked to add and configure all those nice buttons on the page, to make more smooth transitions between pages, and so on. It wouldn’t always turn out exactly as I wanted, but at least I tried. Also I was enjoying analyzing the code written by other people, and now I understand better how developers create such services as Twitter."

“At the program of the Bachelor’s Degree on Sociology, for a few years now we have been conducting an experiment on teaching the modern methods of data analysis and digital research to first year students. However, they should be able not just to analyze the information but also to be able to convert the results of their research to a usable form on their own, and this should be based on the skills obtained during their studies. I am very pleased that more than 20 students from different courses were interested in spending a week on this exciting but hard work. And all that right after their exams, too! I think that the experiment was a success."

Paul Okopnyi, the School instructor

Students share their thoughts on web programming: "I would like to take an active part in creating our own application. My parents asked me to help them to make their own web site, and I hope to be useful to them. Also, I am sure that in the future, distant or not, I will find a way to use these skills, no matter where I will be working."

Irina Krylova, 1st year

“This is really a very interesting thing to study. And besides, web programming can be used in sociological research, too. For example, it can be used to create a service for online surveys. These skills are quite in demand these days, and having them should make us more competitive in the current harsh labour market conditions."

Alina Bakhitova

The final exam will include an improvement of a simple recommender service, and a reputation system for an online resource.

“Both in the optional courses and in the new minor course on Data Science, which will be open to students of all departments in the coming academic year, we are trying to give the students opportunities to apply their skills obtained from their main subjects in such popular areas as web analytics, Human-Computer Interaction, and creating recommender and reputation systems.

 Currently these skills are crucial for improving the competitive value of students in the labour market. We look forward to continuing the practice of short-term schools with a specific topic in the coming year, both for the first year students and for the students who have selected the Data Science minor course in their second year."

Ilya Musabirov, School instructor, Lecturer for the Data Science minor course, member of the SESL staff