Some of our young people from Cambian Wing College were invited to do a one week work experience placement at the IBM offices in Winchester.
The feedback that we have received was that the students participated well during the week and managed to complete the traffic light project they were set and IBM staff have also commented that they did very well and they think the students enjoyed the week and got something out of it.
One of our young people has written up a fantastic account on their time at IBM, listed below in their own words.
“My work experience at IBM Hursley was incredibly enlightening to say the least. I was taught how to build and program a traffic light using a few various resistors, some LED light and a PIC2 chip. First of all I had to plan out what the circuit was going to look like before supervisor soldered it together the following night. I also has to work out the appropriate resistors for the LEDs.
On the following day, the circuit was soldered together on a clipping of prototyping board, I needed to write up the program on the PIC2, which was bit of a challenge because there was a lot of complex binary involved.
Lastly, I had to finish up by writing one the PIC using a reader. The finished product was a working model of a traffic light. My final task was to price the system and also price roughly how much it would cost to build 10 and 100 of these units.
During the week, I had two appointment with other workers in the officer who were responsible for designing the computing chips and running the projects respectively.
Overall I really enjoyed working at IBM and I’m definitely going to hand in my CV and try and get an interview there, as I feel that working there on technology is my calling!”
We are so proud of our young people on their hard work and for fully embracing the opportunity given to them by the staff at IBM.
We received a wonderful article written by Emma Grove, IBM Communications Specialist about the time our students spent at IBM which can be found HERE.