Computer programmers who want to make it big should think small.

Diane Wolff, an associate professor of information systems technology at Virginia Western Community College, plans to make that argument in schools around the region this fall while recruiting for new classes on programming cellphones, Blackberries and other handheld devices, including the less well-known ones used for work-related tasks such as taking inventory.

To try to generate interest in children as young as elementary school age -- a future generation of programmers -- Wolff will be bringing along two robots that run off the Java language that is used in devices ranging from cellphones to meat scales.

Despite the increasing prevalence and capabilities of cellphones, few schools that teach programming have focused on them. Virginia Western will be the first community college in the state to do so when it launches its associate degree in mobile programming this fall, Wolff said. Her school will also offer a career studies certificate requiring 30 credits, about a year's worth of full-time study.

Grants from Hewlett-Packard and Verizon totaling more than $100,000 are being used to set up the programs.

Much of the money went toward tablet PCs loaded with "emulator programs" that allow students to see how well their programs would run on more than 100 different handheld devices.

"There's 3.5 billion cellphones in the world, and somebody's got to be programming those," Wolff said. "The sad part is that we have been way behind ... in this country and so we really need to catch up, and I think the companies really realize that we need to do that."

Unlike desktop and laptop computers, which have large screens and traditional keyboards, handheld devices come in a variety of configurations.

Their keypads are generally more difficult to use, and download speeds are slower when drawing down wireless Internet content. Memory, though improving, pales compared with traditional computers.

Programmers will have to work with all those limitations, as well as the much-smaller screens, when working with handheld devices in mind, Wolff said.

Today's students, who have grown up with cellphones, are likely to bring a new perspective to how consumer devices could be programmed, Wolff said.

Students who want to develop software for handheld devices would likely have to move from the Roanoke Valley, but there are jobs in the area that demand programming skills for such devices, Wolff said.

Robert Wells, vice president of information technology at RGC Resources, the parent company of Roanoke Gas, said utilities have embraced handheld devices for tasks such as reading meters, and having people who can maintain such devices is attractive in the industry.

Christopher Fury, lead application analyst/programmer for AT&T Communication Systems Southeast in Roanoke, said his company's technicians are carrying around both Blackberries and laptop computers at the moment, but "what we'd like to be able to do, instead of having our technicians carry a bulky laptop, they just carry around a Blackberry."

"The difficulty is finding people who are trained in WAP and Java ME," he said, referring to wireless application protocol, which allows access to the Web from handheld devices, and Java Micro Edition, the version of the language used in many such devices.

"What I see is there's a lot of demand for this [knowledge] in town," Wolff said.

"We have IT business partners [that] have told us this. That's why we set up the program."