Ward Huysmans is an exchange student who is currently studying at the Computer Application degree program at HAMK. He represents his team to tell us about their interesting mobile application project. The team created an application which revolves around culinary activities. This project was included in the mobile programming studies which was also for Business Information Technology (tietojenkäsittely) students. During these studies, students also had a chance to hear interesting guest lectures from the IT business world. Juha Riippi from Vincit and Juha Wiberg and Ismo Kilpeläinen from Ambientia visited classes and shared useful insights from the working life point of view.
What application were you working on?
For our project we created an application called Food World. It’s an application where you can share recipes from all different countries. First you select the country and then you can choose between many different recipes or create your own. You can also save your favorite recipes. Once you select a recipe you can add the ingredients to your shopping cart. Your shopping cart will be stored on your phone so you can always see what ingredients you need.
How was it working on the project?
The teamwork and working on the project was fun. Our group consisted of 2 Germans and 2 Belgium’s. We came up with the idea after watching cooking application from a YouTube channel named cooking with dog. I made a joke after watching a video that we should make a cooking application and after some time the joke turned into an idea.
When we started working together, we quickly divided the roles of who is going to do what so that there would not be problems. Because we all had some experience in programming, the project itself was not that hard. Not to say that it went without problems because we had a couple of them. Our rule was that if someone had a problem everyone needed to come up with a solution. It was weird doing a project with people from other countries, but it was also fun. You get to learn things they have seen, and you can teach them about everything you know.
Guest lecturer Juha Riippi from Vincit introduced the business side of mobile apps
I was invited to lecture at HAMK about mobile application marketing and analytics. I’ve been working with mobile apps for over 15 years and recently I have concentrated more and more on the business side of things in mobile app development, so I was happy to accept the invitation.
The students of my class were at the moment focusing on mobile applications in their programming studies, so I tried to adjust the contents to be an overview of mobile application business models, data analytics, and marketing. These are not necessarily things that they will focus on during their professional careers, but I think understanding them a little bit will help in the future.
The lecture was held remotely due to the current COVID-19 situation, but everything went smoothly. Some of the students were really active and asked a lot of questions, while some assumed the role of the listener. The feedback I got was really encouraging and I’ll be happy to do the lecture again next year if needed. I want to thank all the students for their attention and time and I hope that they will find the contents useful. I think every mobile developer should know a little bit about how to plan their applications, how to measure its usage (analytics), and how to market it after its launch.
Juha Wiberg and Ismo Kilpeläinen from Ambientia gave students insights how developers daily life looks at a middle-sized software company
Our cooperation with HAMK is useful for students, for HAMK as well as for ourselves at Ambientia. With the help of our guest lectures, we can deepen student’s understanding on certain topics that we feel are necessary to master in order to get an internship or a job in Ambientia or elsewhere in the software development industry. At the same time, we can also bring out the working life perspective in teaching, so that it become more concrete for students that things what they are learning are necessary and useful in working life. Hopefully, the things taught through this guest lecture will be remembered a little better and students will be able to get more spark to deepen their knowledge and skills. We want to wish students an inspiring autumn in learning new things!
