App Dev Challenge for High School Students

The challenge is on! Progress® is excited to be hosting an app-a-thon for 30 high school students from the AOIT program at Apex High School in Apex, North Carolina, on Thursday, December 18, 2014 in our Morrisville, North Carolina office.

The AOIT App Development Challenge is an application development workshop for local high school students, in partnership with the Academy of Information Technology (AOIT), a chapter of the National Academy Foundation. Progress is joining leading IT companies SAS and IBM to sponsor the app dev challenge, which is designed to spark students’ ideas and show them how to turn them into reality using technology. At the same time, this challenge gives students the opportunity to glimpse the world of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers.

This all-day event will consist of a short education session and a tour of Progress Software, including the data center and sales, marketing, and IT departments. The students will then break off into groups of two to learn how to quickly build a mobile app using the leading-edge app dev and deployment technologies in the Progress® Pacific™ platform, including Progress Rollbase® and Modulus™. At the close of the session, each team will present and demonstrate their fully functional mobile apps. The winning team’s app will be selected by its peers.

Recently my colleague at Progress, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, VP of Technology, shared his belief that "It's important to expose students to programming early in their academic careers, as programming jobs are growing at double the national average. With the National Academy Foundation and Apex High School’s AOIT program, students are beginning to earn professional certifications by the end of the first semester of ninth grade. Progress is proud to host its first app development challenge. Who knows – we could be witnessing the next technology breakthrough."

I’m thrilled to be working at a company like Progress, where we are committed to working with students around the world to nurture a love of technology, spark innovation and create educational opportunities in IT. This North Carolina event is part of a larger global Progress initiative to recruit talented developers while fostering early adoption of Progress tools.

Visit Progress Pacific to get more information about our rapid application development tools and technology.

Follow the conversation about Progress Pacific at @PRGSPacific.