IT Youth

Youth congress draws big crowd of knowledge-hungry students

Alexander Villafania
INQ7.net

THE THIRD Philippine Youth Congress in Information Technology (Y4IT) has drawn its biggest crowd to date, nearly 7,000 students from high schools and colleges nationwide, one of its organizers said.

Y4IT was held from September 15 to 17, highlighting current events in the IT industry in the field of e-learning, video game development, the contact center business, open source programming, network security, robotics, wireless communications technologies and bio-informatics, among others.

UP assistant vice president for development Jaime D.L. ; said delegates came from as far north as Batanes province and as far south as Tawi-Tawi province. He said the UP Theater where they held the three-day even was unable to accommodate the throngs of students that continued to arrive.

"We had to refuse entry to other students because the UP Theater was already full up to the lobby. These students had to brave the rain just to attend," Caro said, adding that the UP Theater could only sit 2,000.

Caro added that they had almost doubled the number of attendees since they started in 2003.

He attributed the increase to the growing interest of students in IT careers.

"For many of these students it was their first time to see the presentations that we lined up during the last three days so they were really happy to get the big picture about the whole IT industry," Caro said.

Y4IT was organized by the University of the Philippines' Information Technology Training Center, the Department of Science and Technology's Virtual Center for Technology Innovation, and the Diliman Computer Science Foundation Inc.

For next year, Caro said, they might shift the event's format to breakout sessions to allow students to choose which IT tracks to attend. The UP Film Center next to the UP Theater could also be used for next year's Y4IT.

Philippine Youth Congress in Information Technology (Y4IT)