Partner Universities Summer Program, University of British Columbia, July 2015

The Vancouver Summer Program (VSP) is a four-week academic program offered by various Faculties at the University of British Columbia, Canada for students from cooperating universities.

To learn building Web application and have an international experience with various students.

I had no group development experience until then.I thought that developing overseas while learning about web development would be a valuable experience. And I didn't havemany opportunities to speak English in Japan, so I thought it would help me study English.

The daily schedule is as follows:

There was a lot ofoptional events everyday (eg Night Market, Museum, Hike)I basically did group activities and homework after school, so I didn't participate much in optional event.

The calendar for the month is as follows:

The class period was written as 7/13~8/13, but the actual class period was 7/15~8/8.

Most of the participants went on a trip atweekend and the last five consecutive holidays.

Students choose between 69 packages. Each package has two classes. Each class is approximately 39 hours of class time. Classes are interactive and include group work and discussions. Evaluationinclude assignments, group projects, papers, exams, and participation marks.

Schedules and lesson contents vary greatly depending on the package.(I heard that engineering packages(ECE)are usually busy.)
My package is principles of the modern internet(ECE).

We always acted by package, and my package was the most popular inthe ECE. My package had90 students.Other packages had about 60 students.
The syllabus was released just before the start of the program, so we could hardly prepare for it.

That classdidn’tcompletely replace a regular course in algorithms that is part of most Computer Science & Engineering programs.

I have already learnedAlgorithm but there aresome points that I thought were different from Japanese classes.

First, there was a great emphasis on Computational Complexity and Ploofs of Algorithms.In all contents, these were strongly conscious.

Next, there was much developmental contentsuch as Divide and Conquer, DP, Distributed System.And there were many advanced assignments. On the other hand, there was no basic sort such as Bubble sort or basic data structure such as Stack, Queue.

Finally, the amount of assignments was quite high. There were 6 programming assignments and 4 written assignments.

Students weredivided intothegroups of three and buildedweb application ofthe photo gallery together.

Over the course of the whole project (over the four assignments),we build a photo gallery which download a list of images from a server and display them in a dynamically resizing grid. Wecan click on any image to enter a presentation mode, and view other images using "previous" and "next" buttons.We can also eventually implement an auto slideshow mode, where images will automatically change after a certain period of time.

I thought HTML and CSS would take a little more time to study, but not much.This was also more advanced than I imagined. And There was plenty of time for discussion during class.

Weused the time after school to advance the projectwith my team member.Idiscussed with group members a lot.

There were optional tours (Victoria, Whistler, Tofino, Rockies,) at the weekend.Students can apply to school or ABC in advance.

Ijoined 3 tours (Victoria, Tofino, Rockies). These are really amazing. I stronglyrecommend visiting these places.

There were many opportunities for the discussions and I proposed many opinions thereand I heard other member’s opinions.The ability to discuss and speak in English has grown.

I learned the procedures and methods for developing apps in groups. I was most experienced in the group, so I often led the group and was able to improve my leadership.And The lessonand assignmentsweredifficult, so I helped a lot with my friends.

Theseexperiences led to broadening my horizons. I want to make use of this experience to take international and multifaceted actions and give various options in future discussions.

I developed my photo gallery and my development skills grew. I was able to earn advanced algorithm knowledgeby learning contents more advanced than I imaginedsuch as Dynamic Programing, Divide and Conquer.

The campus was very clean and spacious with many student residence.Thank you for this opportunity.