Last week, Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) and iNVENTeam hosted two workshops so students could prepare for the upcoming HackTJ event, which will be held from April 26-27 at Jefferson.

The first workshop featured Corona Labs. Shawn Grimes, a mobile-app developer and teacher, demonstrated how to use Corona SDK to simplify application making. At the workshop, students began building a popular arcade game, Whac-A-Mole, for the iPhone using Corona SDK.

The second workshop featured Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS team taught students how to build a ruby server, connect to a database and create a dynamic website. Students also worked to create their own online chat client and experimented with backend, frontend, databasing and EC2 instances.

“The workshops were definitely popular among the students. I hope everyone learned a lot,” senior and co-director of HackTJ, Alex Sands said.

Two Facebook workshops will occur in the coming week. A brainstorming workshop to help students come up with ideas will be held on April 23, while a main workshop to introduce students to Facebook’s developer portal will occur on April 24 during eighth period.

”I enjoyed the two workshops, and I plan on attending the next one,” freshman Shubham Gupta said. “I’m attending HackTJ so this will definitely help.”