Student Blog

2 min read

The sheer diversity of the clubs here at APU has always been something fascinating to me. From the more professional, business case-related clubs to the friendlier, more laid-back ramen-eating clubs, APU’s got everything to offer.

I had the opportunity to attend one of the workshops hosted by one such diverse club, Class Doko. Initially created to maintain the Project B-winning platform Class Doko, a search engine for all the courses and their classrooms here at APU, the club has since expanded into providing tech-based and entrepreneurship-related seminars and workshops.

Class Doko’s Design Xperience workshop, aimed at teaching IT skills to students, such as graphic design using the Figma app, spanned over four days. The workshop featured Arham Shams Sameer from the University of Texas, Arlington—a software and game developer—and Annie Hoang, an APU graduate known for her YouTube videos, graphic design, and an organization called CREABA, which aims to empower creative individuals.

Since Arham was based in the U.S., the first two sessions were held over Zoom. Anticipating a language barrier, especially for Japanese participants, Class Doko explored Zoom’s English-to-Japanese live translation feature and decided to incorporate it into the first two sessions.

Initially, the feature seemed too expensive, so they planned to rotate between two trial accounts to make it work. When APU’s Student Services office heard about this, they stepped in and covered the cost, showing strong support for student-led initiatives. Class Doko now plans to use the feature more regularly in future events.

Arham’s sessions mostly focused on professional guidance for Figma —step-by-step setup instructions, designing something that could be turned into a webpage, how buttons and prototyping features work, understanding the mechanics, and the principles behind user interface design.

Annie’s sessions centered around how design thinking works—a creative problem-solving process that involves empathizing with users, defining problems, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing. On the final day of Annie’s workshop, participants focused on refining their presentation timing and received feedback from Annie, which was all related to applying design thinking principles.

After four days of engaging sessions and enthusiastic participation, the workshop ended on an inspiring note. Meheraz Tiash, founder of Class Doko, shared how the platform began—not with coding, but with a simple mock-up on Figma. He wasn’t a programmer, but with a clear idea and the right collaborators, it came to life.

His message was clear: you don’t need technical skills to start—just a vision and the drive to begin.

Class Doko is now working on a coding workshop, so stay tuned!

Rahman Mir Mustaufiq

Hello, everyone! I'm Razin, a 4th year APM student. If you enjoy discussing Marxism or reading fictional novels, feel free to say hi when you see me on campus. I'm excited to promote APU through my SPA articles, especially through the perspective of all my peers!