Computer science- work experience help

[KingCatMeowInSpace]

What type of work experience have your kids done if they are interested in applying for software development/computer science degrees. He takes computing at school and has a couple of beginner python books he has worked his way through at home for fun but is there anything else you'd recommend that would look good in his uni application next year? Something where he could review and test code? Or do enhancements to code? Or anything else of use. He's 16. Thanks

Is he doing any open source contributions on GitHub? That’s a great way to get started and there are a lot of ones that are open to beginner friendly commits type thing.

Mine had a work experience week with JP Morgan

There are in-person and virtual work experience opportunities here:

Speakers for Schools
The Recruit

^ this, it is like making an art portfolio of your work. Is there any particular thing he finds interesting?

Ds didn't have any in person work experience just all online challenges, completed those and moved on. Like these www.codewars.com/

Keep a record (spreadsheet) of all the things he does now, and where it led him and what he found interesting. Grades wise if he is very academic then the top universities for computer science want maths and further maths A levels not necessarily computer science although applicants usually take it if they already know they love it.

Google summer schools for the summer of year 12 for computer science, some are free, some are paid for. Both my children did these in the subjects they were interested in.

Ds did GCSE and A level computer science, went to a high ranking uni to study it and is now in a graduate job as a software engineer.

Thank you so much everyone / that all sounds great - yes he's academic but not as much writing English subjects and much more so with maths and computing and chemistry he's not looked into any of the things you all mention so I'll get him on to those- sounds great. Much appreciated.

He just had a look at CodeWars and loved the idea of working his way through challenges from easy to hard. But found even the lower level ones very difficult - does anyone know of a similar site but starts at a lower level?

Id recommend just getting in and getting stuck even if it’s for days tbh! One of the best things to be able to learn with programming is to be able to do is google (or stack overflow) your way out of a problem and he can also use the code wars tutorials

Coursera has online python courses that can take you much farther than the school curriculum. Scratch is an easy language to learn for writing simple games.

My dd got work experience via a friend of a friend who is in game design.

Ok I'll tell him to look at codewars tutorials and coursera that you mention and see how he gets on. He did scratch a few years ago but now doing python and C++ at beginner lever but very keen to work his way up so I'm trying to find something that won't put him off as too advanced but he can work his up in. Thanks.

I don't know about your finances obviously but maybe get him a Raspberry Pi kit computer to do Python on, maybe for Christmas? www.raspberrypi.org/learn

I think it's valuable to fully understand what a computer is and can do e.g. connect to, instruct and receive data from other things, and reckon this is one route to it. There are also books of projects and code camps he could do. For example (this might be a little old now, but there are many other books) www.amazon.co.uk/Raspberry-Pi-Projects-Evil-Genius/dp/0071821589

Raspberry pi sounds a great idea for Xmas- don't know much about it but shall definitely check it out. And the link you posted looks like it has python projects so I'll show him - thanks for that.

ChatGPT, Gemini or one of the other GenAI tools will be far quicker to help you with problems.

Just always be aware that you need to test what they tell you - they will hallucinate and give incorrect answers.

Additionally, using these will introduce him to both GenAI and Prompt Engineering, which are big growth areas - if he can learn how they work as well as use them, that's a big plus

Start doing his own projects and storing them on his personal GitHub. Taking part in Hackathons seems to come up quite a lot too.