My week at Mesomorphic

Connor Flynn Young shares his experiences on his work placement with Mesomorphic.

• 14 July 2017
• By Connor Flynn Young
•  Work Experience

Introduction

My name is Connor Flynn Young I am 15 years old I study at the Anderson High School and the subjects I do is modern studies, graphic communication, computing science, engineering science, physical education. One of the reasons I came to Mesomorphic is because in my school work experience I was doing manual labour at the new Eric Gray building site so I wanted to do something completely different and my gran said about this place. It sounded good and it is completely different to manual labour and I love working with computers. For a while I wanted to be a computer game designer and this is pretty close to that.

Day One

I was introduced to Mesomorphic and was shown and told what the place does and I watched video about scrum and about version control. I was given a project description for a live project to read, where I created some user stories to understand the software requirement from the user side and manager side and Mesomorphic side of things

I was shown by Tim about programming and how he tested them. He let me test a piece of software where we were testing how the software works with Chinese letters. I have also today been playing a script game called code-combat and am enjoying playing and learning at the same time.

Day Two

For most of the day until 1PM I was with Tim and he was showing me what he does and how to do it. At first he was showing me how to get pictures to display in the software and how to test it and how to program it. It was very interesting and he was showing me how GitHub works and how to use it.

After lunch I was put onto a website called code academy. It is a website that helps you learn how to program lots of languages. I picked python because that’s what I do in school. I did seven tasks and then went onto ProjectEuler. Later on I was asked to make a flow diagram on LucidChart based on discussion we had about the background scheduler.

Game Review

Light Bot

This was an OK game be was a bit too easy but you could get it on your phone as well so you can have it on the go and you can get on a computer as well the aim of the game was to get a bot from one pace to another place within a certain amount on actions the only bad thing was that you could only pick about four or five actions to do.

Code Monkey

This game was good but it was a bit boring, but was enjoyable. you have to write a code/program that moves a monkey and you have to get the the banana you have to get around objects.

Code Combat

It was the best game because it was exciting as well as learning the aim of the game is to write a program and get through a level and there is like ogres and other things trying to kill you and you write a program to kill them or go around them.

Code Monkey

This is a website with lots of information and has lots of questions on it. It was ok but was a bit boring mainly because it wasn’t a game but it did have loads of questions on just about anything.

Day Three

Until lunch I was making a floor plan of the office room making six work stations and a meeting room as well. After lunch I was making a spreadsheet of all the stuff that was going in to office from my floor plan and finding how much every thing will cost and where to get it from. I had to list what the price will be after VAT and before VAT and putting how many you need so the company had a budget. At about 4 PM there was a meeting review two interviews which were held Tuesday and today.

Day Four

In the morning I was making a spreadsheet for Maria to go to an event in Edinburgh. I had to get five hotels with prices and figure out the total cost of the trip including travelling, and calculate the amount of funding which would be made available from HIE. After I then went on to playing code-combat for a bit and then went on putting my blog onto the Mesomorphic website. After I had done all that, I went on to to trying to make Tic Tac Toe in python, occasionally pairing with Tim.

Day Five

This morning I was trying to finish off what I started on Tic Tac Toe. I got about half way through, where the program would list the winners of the previous five games. I paired with Barnaby for most of the day and I did do some of it by myself. For lunch we had a team meeting with pizza in the afternoon where was another team meeting and I published my blog on the Mesomorphic website.