APEX for 55+ people - The landscape

After a short holiday it's time to start blogging again.

I already blogged about the idea of teaching APEX to people older than 55. So let's see how my pilot person looked like.

It's a Belgian man, born in 1949, so almost 60 years old. His children are out the door, but he's still working as a mathematics teacher. His first experience with computers was at university where he worked with a punchcard machine. After that he worked with an Apple II, IBM pc's and now he does his computer activities on a regular Wintel platform.

In the early days he played around with Apple Works, WordPerfect and he even developed a bit with FileMaker Pro. Nowadays he's mainly working with Word and Excel and also communicates with his students with mail and through the internet. In his school he also needs to work with a planning tool, a Blackboard tool (online student system) and some other little programs.

This person has always been trying to find ways to improve the quality of the lessons and other ways to help the students, the teachers and the school.

So I would describe this person as a motivated 55+ year old working person, who has already some knowledge about pc's and knows Word and Excel well.

When I was talking to him about Oracle Application Express and showed him some things he could use for his students and colleagues (for ex. to do follow-up or to plan classes) he was very interested to investigate more. Instead of me doing the application, we agreed to give it a try to get himself up-to-speed with APEX, so he could develop things himself. The timing was ideal as he had holidays. So we started in the beginning of July with this pilot program... APEX for 55+ (year old) people!

He has his own desk with a Windows pc (not the newest one), Office, an anti-virus program and some other small software. He only knows Oracle from the stocks and some articles in magazines. He knows a tiny little bit of SQL, but doesn't know anything about webdevelopment, the Oracle database, PLSQL and APEX.

In Part 2 I'll write about his first steps with APEX.