Whenever I came to OSSM, I never thought my senior year would be spent doing a computer science mentorship under Prof. Jones at a company in Norman called NextThought. However, it quickly became evident over junior year that I really enjoyed my computer science classes and was doing well in them, so it only made sense that I would want to take my computer science experience further.
Starting in August of my senior year, I began traveling weekly to meet with Prof. Jones and his coworkers at his workplace about beginning a project there. Eventually, they settled on tasking me with programming a command line tool that will be able to export their assessments into the IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) assessment standard in order to work with their partners from other companies.
You may be asking, “What is he even talking about?” and at first I really didn’t know what they were talking about either until I read up on on QTI. That’s right, I had to do a lot of reading before I even wrote a single line of code. In fact, I had to read over 15,000 words to be more precise.
Eventually, I began writing the first version of my project in Java as a proof of concept, or to show that the logic behind my ideas works. Once it was decided that my logic was sound, I moved onto the second step of my project. Since NextThought’s entire sever runs in Python, my next step was to construct a second version of my project in the Python language. I had never used Python before but I learned it quickly since it’s known for its readability and ease of use for beginning programmers.
Now, you’re probably wondering what exactly I have been programming all this time. At NextThought, they have developed their own assessment standard called NTI which has nine question types. These question types allow them to construct tests which include multiple choice, short answer, essay, matching, etc. The command line tool I’m developing has to take their format, extract the data from each question, and reconstruct that data so that it fits the QTI standard. Currently, I would say that I’m about 70% of the way to completion after 2,000 lines of Python and many hours of painfully debugging my messy code. I plan to finish it by the end of this school year so that NextThought can actually utilize all of the hard work I’ve done.
Above all, the work experience I have gained over the course of my mentorship will prove to be invaluable in future internships and jobs to come.