Notes

Last year I worked as a paid contractor for Cornwall council. I was paid £250 in total to enter data from physical documents into various excel spreadsheets. In a certain time frame of two weeks, this gave me the experience of having a deadline and needing to work in a set period of time. This also let me gain knowledge of how invoices worked and how the payment process worked. I stopped being a paid contractor as I decided to work on my A-level studies and for the reason that the work was sporadic in the format of waiting for there to be new data to input.

When I was 16 I entered a coding competition for software Cornwall. In this competition, I and a random group of people were tasked with building/ programming a remote control rover.
We were given a presentation on the various tasks our rover needed to be able to complete, such as being able to move in any direction and be able to move over rough/ inclined surfaces. We then got into our groups and voted on the roles for our members, I was voted as the team leader which meant I had to make a timetable for the team and make the final presentation about our rover for when we would present it on the final day (along with the base amount of coding every member had to do). I made sure that the right people were on the right jobs for their skillset and I also made sure we were taking breaks when needed to keep up momentum within the group. At the end of the week, we made sure that our rover was operational. and presented to the group. We ended up in second place in the competition.

For my A-level computer science, I had to complete a coursework project. For my project, I designed booking software for a local music teacher. This allowed for the booking and cancelling of lessons, along with a calendar and more complex features such as statistics on income earned. Over the year I designed, coded and recorded the work I put into the project and I was successful. I had to overcome many challenges such as making it so the code could email the teacher the weekly router and how I would connect a database to the project. The main issue was storing confidential data in the database and how I would keep the data secure. So I had to incorporate encryption and verification across the project. Such as security questions and password-protected pages. I ensured quality by taking surveys of students (of the clients and my classmates) that I got to use the software. I also had an interview with the client to make sure the software was up to standard. In the end, it was a success.