28th
of October 2011 was selected as the day to hold the seminar about Information
Technology in Sigiriya Central College. Malinda Kumarasinghe, Semil Hashan,
Geeth Tharanga, Thilina Premasiri, Rukshan Chathuranga and Anushka Mahesh left
the Moratuwa area at 2.00 am to head for the venue. The coordination with the
school was done by Thilina Premasiri.
We
arrived to the school at about 7.00 am and started to set up projectors and
Notebook computers for the seminar with the help of school staff. The seminar started
at 8.30 am and about 125 students attended. The principal of the Sigiriya Central
College did the welcome speech to introduce us and to give a brief speech on
why students should acquire IT skills.
The first of us to address the
seminar was Anushka Mahesh. He delivered a presentation on the Importance of
Information technology in Sri Lanka today. This was followed by a
demonstrative lecture by Geeth Tharanga on Basic of Microsoft Windows
operating system. After that, Malinda Kumarasinghe explained to the students on
how to work with Microsoft Word and Shemil Hashan did a presentation on Computer
Hardware. The last Lecture to hold before the Interval was about Tecnology
and Working with Internet by Rukshan Chathuranga.
There was an interval for about
40 minutes before continuing with our seminar. And after the Interval Malinda
Madushan delivered a presentation on programming languages and demonstrated
coding 2 small Visual Basic 98 programs. We concluded our seminar with the
thanking speech by Thilina Premasiri. Students were asked to give feedback on
the seminar and one student came to the stage and thanked us on behalf of the
school. We also received notes of feedback from many students. After finishing
the seminar, we were thanked by the staff we met and we left Sigiriya Central
College at about 1.30 pm.
Based on all of the feedback we
received, we came to the decision that the seminar in overall was a success. This
seminar would not be success without all the help from the principal and the
staff from the school, staff of the CSE and CS&ES and all our friends who
supported us on this task.