Serverless Education Roadshow: Cairo, Alexandria, Amman, and Tunis.

The serverless developer advocacy team ran the first ever, serverless educational roadshow (ERS) in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) regions. The ERS is a program designed to introduce AWS serverless and event driven architectures (EDA) to university students around the world. This week’s roadshow encompassed four cities across three countries in five days. In those five days we lead 500+ students through educational presentations and the Serverlesspresso workshop.

Leaders of the ERS included Mohammed Youssef, BD E2W AWS WWPS; Zainab Allawi, Assoc SA AWS WWPS; Tariq Abubaker SA, AWS WWPS; Ben Smith, Sr. DA Serverless, and Eric Johnson Pr. DA Serverless. Additionally, we were supported remotely by Hesham Galal, Sr SA AWS WWPS. This team is also known as the Shababs. Search twitter for the #ShababsOnTour hash tag to follow the updates.

The curriculum for the ERS was an all-day immersion into serverless. Starting with four hours of presentation and interaction on the following topics:

• Introduction to serverless and event driven architectures
• Building a serverless application on AWS serverless for beginners
• Choosing the right serverless service for your applications
• Building next-gen applications with serverless
• Building your cloud skills for future economy

In the second half of the day, the students worked through the Serverlesspresso workshop where they built a fully working version of the Serverlesspresso booth application.

Sunday 3 July: ITI - Cairo, Egypt

As we arrived to ITI on Sunday morning, we quickly picked up in the energy of the students and how excited they were to take part in this project. The day was supposed to start at 9:30 AM, however; the leadership asked if we could delay 30 minutes as students were still coming in from remote places in Cairo and Egypt. By the time we started, there were 175 attentive students ready to participate.

At the end of the day, the school passed out certificates of completion for the students. The students then swarmed us to have us sign their certificates and take pictures with them. This was a humbling experience. The students were so thrilled to meet folks from AWS, but it was more than that. They were excited to have access to AWS accounts and be able to build an application for themselves.

That night, we all loaded up into Mohamed’s rental jeep and made the long drive to Alexandria, Egypt. If you have never ridden or driven on Cairo or Alexandria, that is truly an experience to get the heart pumping. After many questions and fearful gasps from Ben and me, we quickly learned a new phrase from Mohamed and Zainab, “this is normal”.

Monday 4 July: AAST – Alexandria, Egypt

The second school on the trip was AAST in Alexandria, Egypt. This school was so excited to have AWS coming to their campus that they made quite a large ordeal. There was, literally, a red carpet for us to walk in on. Like ITI, the students at AAST were extremely excited to learn about AWS and serverless. Additionally, there were professors, staff members, and graduate students that took the day to learn as well.

The roadshow was such a huge success that one professor from AAST said the workshop was beyond amazing and beyond expectations. She was astonished that the students were interested in the theoretical part of the presentation and is evaluating moving AWS training to an earlier position in the students training.

At the end of the day, they presented the students with a certificate of achievement and wanted us to sign and take pictures with them as well. They also presented us a commemorative trophy honoring their 50 years in existence and this partner day with AWS.

Tuesday: travel day

On Tuesday, we travelled back to Cairo to catch an airplane to Amman, Jordan. We also assessed how the days were going and how they can be improved. The results to be discussed shortly.

Wednesday 6 July: HTU – Amman, Jordan

Wednesday morning, we journeyed to HTU in Amman, Jordan. Like the other schools the students were very excited to see us and were engaged throughout the sessions and the workshop. At this school, they broke the students up into smaller rooms and worked on the workshop together at tables, desks, counters, or on the floor. This gave us the opportunity to sit with the groups and hear about their plans and dreams.

After the workshop was complete, we returned to the large hall to award certificates, sign certificates, and take a billion awesome pictures with the students. When the day was over, they then rushed us to the airport to catch a flight back to Cairo to layover for the night.

Thursday 7 July: TekUP – Tunis, Tunisia

On Thursday morning we made another trip back to the Cairo airport to fly to Tunis, Tunisia. For this leg of the journey, Mohamed could not join us, so it was just Ben, Zainab, and myself (Eric). We were picked up by Khaled Jerbi, the founder of the school and taken immediately to the school to start the day at 1:00 PM.

This school is different from the others because it is a private technical school designed to help students in Tunisia and North Africa become educated and certified in many technologies. The school educates the students and pays for their certifications. The school provides scholarships for students to attend full time.

To set the scene, this was the Thursday before the Islamic holiday, Eid Al Adha. Traditionally, the students would be home with their families. Instead, the students travelled for hours to be a part of the roadshow. We were told that many of the students would need to leave early to get home. This was not the case. The students stayed in a very hot room, until late in the evening, because they were having so much fun learning serverless. We were blown away by the dedication to stay and drive to learn. In fact, at the request of the students, we extended the time on the Event Engine accounts for them to continue on the next modules of the workshop.

Friday 8 July: Recovering

On Friday, Zainab headed back to Bahrain and Ben and took the opportunity to catch up on work and reflect over the week. Khalid also took us out on the town in Tunis to see a few sights before we left.

The trip was an absolute life changer for me. It was amazing to teach the students a new technology and yet learn from them about life and things to come. Until the next one!

Here from the students