This month's highlights

• Innovative approach to school management launched
• Opportunities for ICT SMMEs at a high profile event
• Unique product for learners and educators being developed at The Innovation Hub
• Students benefit from unique education experience
• Software development made easy

Students benefit from unique education experience

The EPI-USE IT Coachlab (ITCL) at The Innovation Hub is currently in its third year of operation and commenced its activities for 2003 at the end of January this year.

Five new student employees joined the ITCL for the programme this year, three of whom are sponsored by EPI-USE Systems and two by Comparex. Students sponsored by individual companies will be expected to accept employment at the respective companies at the start of 2004 if there are job vacancies.

Back from left to right: Prof Roelf van den Heever of Epi-Use and students Patrick Hickey, Emil Saayman, Robert Ellis and Thabo Matshi, all, and front from left to right: Lesedi Dibakwane, a final year BCom Informatics students at UP and Lillian Li, also a post-graduate student enrolled in a honours degrees in Computer Science at UP.

The 2003 programme builds on experience gained during the previous two years. The ITCL has researched, inter alia, the preconditions needed to be internationally competitive in software development. Countries such as India and Russia are currently favourite destinations for outsourced software contracts from the USA and Europe. Supporting processes and artifacts have subsequently been developed.

The ITCL participants are involved in two projects in addition to their studies. The first involves a Web presence for the ITCL modeled on the Web interface for an e-commerce application, and based on a case study from Sun Microsystems. This case study is representative of a typical Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) project and will allow students to expand and consolidate their J2EE knowledge and software development capabilities.

The second project involves the development of an e-commerce application proposed by the student-team and using the Sun Microsystems case study as a model. This creates opportunities to innovate and consolidate their J2EE development abilities.

A typical J2EE application executes in a distributed heterogeneous computing environment. In addition, the projects will involve aspects of mobile computing and possibly real-time embedded computing.

The overriding goal is that all activities should be of export quality.

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