A New Computer Science Program is Born

This story is about a computer science program in my hometown. It’s a very special computer science program because it has a chance to become something great (without becoming something big).

The Dream

I did my bachelor and master studies at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. We have two technical universities in my city, and this one is "supposed" to be better, but it is too post-soviet. No, it actually is too soviet, because either you move forward or you stay in the past. And it’s not even about people. There certainly were people who didn’t want to do a thing. But there were also plenty of others who wanted to do their job well. However in order to change the way of how a system works it’s not enough to have good people, you have to reach a critical mass of exceptional people that are willing to make changes.

Students. Just before my talk.

When I was in the end of my bachelor I started to say that we need a computer science program in Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU). People were laughing at me, they said that you need to do this kind of programs in a technical university and at that time UCU was teaching theology, history, psychology, journalism, etc… Personally I think that programmers may benefit from theology, but this story is not about that. UCU was a university which was trying to make things working the right way, the new way. It was established in 2002 as a successor of Theological Academy of Lviv and since then new educational programs started to appear there. UCU is small and it maintains a good quality.

The Introduction

In the first months of this year I got to know that there is going to be a computer science program at UCU. This is a kind of a moment when dreams come true. But my dream was not only about CS program in UCU, it was about the best program on earth. I knew that I can help at least in some way. So I wrote an email to Bishop Borys Gudziak, who is the president of UCU, asking if I can be involved. After a few days he forwarded my email to the people in charge of the CS program and we started to discuss. I visited Lviv, attended the planning session for 1st semester, shared my experience from the university of Lugano (which has a very nice curriculum). It is really amazing how these people are finding ways to make things work despite all the crappy laws and other issues that are still around in Ukraine. From that time I'm trying to provide as much aid as I can do remotely, which is usually about promoting, making contacts with EU researchers and sharing my own experience.

A student studying late in the evening

The Presentation

Now I'm visiting Ukraine for a couple of weeks, and I was invited to give a talk in front of the students of the CS program. I could talk about whatever I want for around 1 hour. As these were 1st semester students I've decided not to go too technical. I talked about the hacker culture, ethics, responsibility. I encouraged them to be openminded and to experiment. Showed how Pharo provides intuitive debug-driven development compared to PyCharm (they are learning Python). And of course I've told them a bit about my research.

Quick introduction to OOP. (photo: CS@UCU)

Because another speaker couldn't make it I agreed to present a week earlier so I had only 5 days to prepare. As the result I've spoke for 2 hours :). But is was a presentation in the end of the day, and the students enjoyed it, so I just went on and got warm thanks in the end. Some students got really curious about Pharo and possibilities in CS research. It was really nice to talk with them afterwards.

The Impression

The curriculum is composed according to ACM/IEEE recommendations (as far as Ukrainian educational regulations allow it). There is a great support from Ukrainian IT companies (we have plenty and not all of them are outsourcing). The team is very open and professional. Besides mandatory courses, students can follow clubs like robotics, competitive programming, frontend development. Clubs are still WIP, but how cool is it when late in the evening there is still a student building a wifi-kettle or prototyping a "3D-painer" for pysankas. 

A student working on a wifi-kettle. (photo: CS@UCU)

There are about 45 students admitted for the 1st year. Mostly every week students have tech talks by different people (this semester they already received speakers from IBM, Facebook and ehem… Microsoft). They have and amazing open-space where they can work together. The open-space, and other CS@UCU rooms are situated in the basement of the new university campus (this is very symbolic for me, as when I was born my father was working as a programmer in the basement of St. George's Cathedral).

Acknowledgments

big thanks to:

His Excellency Borys Gudziak for forwarding my email to right people (I know that he has to deal with hundreds of emails each day).

Yaroslav Prytula for staying in touch and being open to my ideas.

Khrystyna Skvarok, Anna Golovchenko, Innocode for running frontend club.

Stéphane Ducasse for collaborating with Ukrainian universities (especially UCU).

Gregorio Robles for pythonic code examples.

Oles Dobosevych for teaching the pythonic way of programming to students and being their "guardian angel" :)

Natalia Tymchuk for sanity-checking and supporting my ideas.

This is the beginning of a story, and only time will show how it proceeds.