Light and Spark NPO’s first event happened on the 13th and 14th of January 2018 at Ramnarain Ruia College, Mumbai. This event hosted 36 Computer Science students and gave an online presence to 1 NGO – Healing Dove Foundation (update 2019: Healing Dove site currently offline).

Throughout the event, the students were guided by their mentors who ensured that each student in their group learnt the concepts that we intended to teach – like Microsoft Azure, WordPress, Agile Scrum, Google Analytics and much more – and the team delivers a good quality product by the end of the second day. What we did, this time, was change the format slightly. We made 3 groups of 12 students each developing and delivering a website for the same NGO. Each website offered the NGO a variant of their final version, thus, giving them an option to select the best out of 3. We then incorporated the best student-team-designed website into the final website which is now online here (update 2019: Healing Dove site currently offline).

(Left pic: Our technical mentor, Biswajit Mishra, training his team on WordPress on Day-1. Right pic: 36 students, NGO representatives and design partners attended our first event at Ruia College, Mumbai.)

We intended to make this entire 2-day experience as industry-like as possible, so we had the NGO representatives from Healing Dove with us throughout the event guiding the 3 student-teams on the requirements and contents of the website. We also had our design partner, Blacksheep Crafts, and 2 design students with us for the event helping the student-teams understand aspects from a design point-of-view. Because all of this had to be completed in just 2-days, the tasks that were given to the students was time-boxed, giving them a feel of working in a time-constrained scenario. The 4 technical mentors and the host-and-mentor of the event provided technical expertise to the student-teams.

(Left pic: Candid pic of the students listening to technical presentations post-lunch with the blurred backdrop of our Operations team putting together a plan of action. Right pic: The host, mentor and founder of Light & Spark NPO, Clyde D’Souza, giving a technical presentation to the students.)

The general feedback from all the students was that they enjoyed their learning experience so much that they wanted this event to be for another day or two. Indeed, when you design such a hands-on, knowledge-filled event, every student benefits a million times. We look forward to executing many more events like these!

Photo Album: bit.ly/lsnporuiajan2018album

If you’re interested in partnering with us for/sponsoring our future events, get in touch with us today.