I saw a computer for the first time at my friend’s house in class 6 and was instantly hooked to it. We used to play some video games on it. Even though computer classes were started in our school from class 8, we were not taught coding. But, thankfully, we were taught about flowcharts. The teacher was excellent, and he forced us to think about the flow of logic before teaching anything about programming language.

It was not until class 11 that I learned about programming languages. The day I was introduced to programming, I was in love. I could not believe that I had the power to design software that real people could use. The class schedule included the programming language FoxPro. It was a relational database management system. That means that we could play with database’s using this language. I and one of my friend joined forces and we decided to make a Fees management system for our school as we found many shortcoming in the current manual method of logging in all the information.

We had a limited time during the computer class to code, and that’s why we took special permission from the principal to code throughout the day and even in recess, whenever we had free time. We were allowed to come even when other sections had a class. This resulted in the best project of the school. Unfortunately, the floppy drive with the program got corrupted, so I can not show the results here.

Highlights

• It had a central database of all the students of the school. The students were referenced by their roll number
• There were separate modules designed in the software for every lab that could register any expences for a student. A similar module existed for the library. All of these modules connected to the central database.
• The Fee section could then pull the data from the central database to create a fee receipt.
• The design of the Fee receipt and its printing were also automated.
• The database was then password protected. It was one of the happiest days of my life when I figured out how to hide the charaters when someone was typing in their passwords (**********)🥳.