If I can go back to high school and pick my own teacher, it would be Mr. Louis Zulli Jr. – a teacher from Centre of Advanced Technologies in Tampa, Florida. He spearheaded a fantastic magnet program that lets high school students develop SharePoint solutions for the school. Examples of these impressive solutions:
- IOS, Android and Windows Phone apps that leveraged SharePoint to display teacher’s assignments, school events and class times;
- Silverlight-based application providing a virtual tour of the campus;
- Integration of SharePoint with Moodle;
- An Academic Planner web application allowing students to plan their classes, submit a schedule, have them reviewed, track of the credits of the classes selected and whether a student’s selections meet graduation requirements;
- An innovative campus Hall Pass system that leveraged jQuery, HTML5, CSS3, XML, JSON, REST, List Data Web Services and features integration with IOS, Windows 8 and swipe card hardware.
These 16-18 year old kids graduates high school with hands on experience not only in SharePoint, but have already build their foundation in project management, business analysis, requirements development, quality assurance, user testing and agile software development.
Lou’s story was showcased today at the SharePoint conference keynote and I had the opportunity to catch up with him:
Also, checkout his presentation from SHARE conference where he explains how the program started and he shows the solutions his students developed:
Kudos Mr. Zulli! Hats off to your great work and paving a promising future for these next generation leaders!
