Abigail Alexander - 3 Month Internship 03-06-2019
Abi came to work for us for 3 months in the summer, on an internship. She is studying Physics at Exeter University, with a focus on Astrophysics.
Abi was looking to expand her knowledge and experience of programming and found a special aptitude in C# in a Windows environment. She loved her time working with us and we hope she’ll be back next summer. Not only did we improve her programming skills, but also bumped up her driving skills, the daily commute providing invaluable expertise.
We didn’t know until her last day working here that she found us and applied to work here because of her brother. He recommended she contact us, because he worked here when he was 15, for work experience!
We are deeply involved with STEM, whether judging on First Lego League or helping out on STEM classes on computing, or taking part with the local university UWE on encouraging youngsters to attend University. The simplest thing we do is to provide work experience for school children, usually in year 10, for a week.
We provide a variety of tasks, starting from first principles, and using the simplest of embedded processor boards, usually based on mbed - there's more detail at mbed.com. The first task is to make an LED flash on and off. As the student develops in confidence and learning then we up the ante, pushing harder to complete more complex tasks.
A favourite tasks to to challenge the student to control the brightness of an LED by using PWM - to drive the LED with a square wave, which is 50% on and 50% off. By using a button, they can control the relative on-ness and off-ness to produce a brighter or dimmer LED. This we usually decribe first on paper, explaining the principles and the engineering behind the approach. What is always satisfying, once the student has completed the task, is to show them on an oscilloscope exactly what we discussed on paper.
One downside of our work with STEM and school children is that we never get to hear what happens to those students. Do they go on to study engineering? Did we sow a seed successfully? We never find out.
So it was hugely satisfying to discover through Abi that her brother, who we met when he was 15, is currently studying Computer Science at Southampton University. We don't claim we had any influence on the trajectory he has taken, but it is satisfying to know what he went on to do.