The Latimer Heights Summer 2020 Internship Experience

The Latimer Heights Specialist Internship experience was a unique one. It allowed for me to both learn and review coding in JavaScript as well as learn more about coding in Python. We were assigned projects which allowed us to strengthen certain points in coding generally. At the start of the program when I had looked over the program, I knew we would be doing coding, which is one of my fields of expertise, due to my 3 years being in CTE Web Design. I had two friends that I could bounce ideas off of in case we didn’t understand something, or needed clarification. So we could always help each other and we worked together throughout the internship.

We had reviewed two main programming languages which were Python and JavaScript and had also further developed our innovative thinking as a programmer. We went through the different types of data that exists in code, which were strings, integers, floats, booleans, none, etc. Starting at the basics we also touched on variables which are used to store any of these data types to be either called later on, or modified. We used all of this knowledge to program some of our own cool things as well! Some of our projects consisted of programs that can prompt the user for input to obtain data from them. This data could then be modified, printed, and displayed for the user to see and confirm. One of our projects that used this was a ticket generator that would prompt the user for their age and other information to calculate the price a movie ticket would cost for them. As an add-on to the program it also prompts the user whether they would want a snack and a drink, which would add on to the total amount of the ticket. This program would also run in a loop and continue to ask the user if they wanted more snacks or drinks if they requested so. The data would be displayed at the end as an array, which would have all the snacks and drinks the user added, along with the price of the ticket as a total.

We had worked on our assignments through the use of websites like repl.it to work on python and P5.js to do JavaScript. Although the two languages share a lot in common they differ in syntax. A lot of the work was very understandable for me because I had learned a lot of JavaScript before taking this internship, so it was a great review for me to test myself to see what I remembered and also to refresh my memory on certain uses of syntax. Python was a little new to me due to the very precise spacing you need to apply in your code, which isn’t really important in JavaScript. The use of functions in either are very different but similar as well.

Overall, I really feel like I’ve learned a lot from this internship and have something to take with me down the road of programming. The key to programming is being able to innovatively think and solve problems. With this skill set in my arsenal I can tackle professions like game development in the future. Thank you Latimer Heights!