WOOT! I have applied.

The School of Computing will be offering a new 4-MC Facebook Programming module on next Semester (AY2007/2008, Semester 2) - CS3216 : Software Development on Evolving Platforms. This is your chance to be a part of this new global Internet phenomenon, currently valued at some US$15 billion.

This new module is not your traditional software engineering course. Enrollment will be open to students of all faculties and students will work in small inter-disciplinary teams to create their killer Facebook applications. Programming experience for non-SoC students is not a pre-requisite (since work will be done in teams).

As it turns out, Trey Phillips , the winner of Facebook F8 Hackathon, is a philosophy major. This suggests than ANYONE can be a Facebook Developer. The nominal pre-requisite is thus CS1101, but students who do not have formal programming background but who have a keen interest in e-entrepreneurship or a background in design. Students will not be assessed individually, but in groups, so individual programming proficiency will not be assessed. Students need only to be able to contribute substantively to their team projects. The success of social networking applications depend a lot on the concept and execution rather than good programming ability. The students can develop their applications in their language of choice, but will likely use PHP or Ruby with mySQL.

Assessment will be project-based and there will be no examination component. The course will begin with several lectures on the fundamentals of web development. Subsequently, students will work in teams to analyze and critique existing Facebook apps in a series of seminars. There will be three team-based assignments and a final team project of the students’ choice. Students are welcome to use this opportunity to develop applications that have commercial potential or can be used as entries to Startup@Singapore.

Places for the course in this initial offering will be limited and some places will be reserved for non-SoC students. To avoid timetable conflicts for students from other faculties and because we be inviting external experts to give occasional guest lectures, the lectures and seminars will be held on Monday evenings from 6.30 to 8.30 pm.

We expect that we will have more students who are keen to take this course than the available places. To ensure a diversity of talent and students have the necessary background for the course, places will not be assigned by CORS bidding. Instead, interested students are to submit a personal statement (with their matriculation number clearly stated) to cs3216staff@googlegroups.com by 15 December 2007. Students will be informed by 26 December 2007 if they are offered a place in the upcoming offering of the new course (and students will automatically be pre-registered for CS3216 on CORS if their bid to take the class is successful).

The personal statement should address the following questions:

(i) Why do you want to take the course?

(ii) Describe your background and how you think it would enable you to contribute to the diversity and vibrancy of the new course and to the team projects.

(iii) Describe a cool Facebook app that you *really* want to build. Explain why you think your app is really cool.

Students are welcome to throw in a resume or portfolio of sorts if they think it would be helpful in demonstrating that they have what it takes to succeed in this new module.

For more infomation: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~bleong/cs3216