Mr Jamie Bonnar Balfour

In 2019 after developing my own tutoring portal, I decided to continue tutoring again. Lessons were carried out both remotely and in person.

As part of one of my courses at Heriot-Watt University I was involved in visiting a school to work with secondary teachers in Computing. This course meant that I visit Ross High School, Tranent, every Wednesday to work in the classroom.

All of my own run classes ran within three Wednesdays back to back. The three lessons were on web development. As well as this I assisted students with programming in all year groups, helped with ICT classes (word processing, spreadsheets, databases, presentation packages and graphics) and gained an excellent understanding of what it is like to work in a classroom.

When I did freelance web development it was my job to develop websites on request for others. The technologies used had to be modern and as a result, I used PHP7, HTML5 and CSS3.

In January 2011, I tutored a pupil who was studying the SQA 'Intermediate 2 Computing' course at school. I would meet him twice a week and prepared loads of materials that he could revise from. In the end, he received an A grade.

I took up the job of tutoring an individual again in September 2011, this time in SQA 'Higher Computing' which saw me meeting the pupil once a week to go through topics they were struggling with. I also prepared loads of helpful materials. In the end, the pupil passed the course with a C.

As my summer job whilst I was at school I worked as a kitchen assistant at Bissets Hotel in Gullane.

This job was an important step for me in becoming confident with individual clients as well as working within a team.

This job saw me working with another member of staff tidying and cleaning the bedrooms for a week and doing various other chores around the premises. It required me to get up at 6 am every morning to be at work by around 8 am to ensure that I would get there on time. It showed that I had determination and efficiency as well as the ability to work well as part of a team.

I noticed our local library was offering a Code Club for kids under the age of 16 and since I wanted to be a teacher and loved programming, I saw this as a golden opportunity. I volunteered on a Saturday morning from 10 am to about 11.30 am.

STEM Net is a system in which schools and other institutes request help from ambassadors. As a STEM Ambassador, I saw a request at Knox Academy, Haddington, (not far from where I lived, and also where I wanted to work someday) and emailed to see how I could help. As it happens, I just missed the post. However, Mr Blair asked if I would still like to help and I accepted.

My role here was as a classroom assistant in the Computing department. I assisted in all levels from S1 to S6 ranging from basic ICT to Advanced Higher Computer Science. Both teachers said that having me there was really useful and that I was incredibly helpful.

"The Watt Club Prize is awarded each year for exceptional distinction in the final honours year and as such recognises the highest achievement possible in undergraduate studies. No more than one prize can be awarded in each distinct discipline offered by a School." I won one of 8 out of all the students graduating from the university at the time.

"For the most deserving student in the fourth year of a degree course in the Department of Computer Science."

"For the most deserving student in the second year of a degree course in the Department of Computer Science."

"Issued to students who obtain more than 70% on average in the first and second years of the degree. I had an average grade of about 80%."

LEAPS or Lothian Equal Access Program for Schools is a system setup by Edinburgh universities (Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh, Napier and Queen Margaret) to help those seeking to enter a university course and/or help them to get into the swing of it all.

I and one other received a Merit Award in the Computer Science course which I received for creating the best project (along with two classmates). Just two of these awards were given away in the class of 20+. I received it for my section of the programming as well as being the team leader. You can find out more in the completed projects section of my website.

In October 2015 I began to work on my BSc Honours year project. As part of this, I developed an application to aid new web developers with web development called ClickIt. The main purpose of this was to help school children and new web developers learn HTML using a drag-and-drop system.

In October 2014 I began working on a completely new project, writing my own BlackRabbit Script in Java. I had to stop due to work and university consuming my time. In May 2015, I rewrote the whole engine. This time within one week, I had written a very powerful engine that can be built upon by others too. After two months of work, it featured a mathematical parser, a logic parser and a compiler for Java code. Some of my friends and colleagues were very interested and have written programs in my language. There is much more about it on my website.

As part of my own website development and moving away from using third party plugins, I decided to invent my own plugins that can easily be reused. I call this group of plugins my Web Independently Styled Project (WISP) and it consists of a slideshow, responsive navigation bar, PHP comment system, a content management system and much more.

This project is a personal project to build the best content management system out there! In July 2017, the project was renamed DASH and was rebuilt from the ground up. My CMS is designed from the ground up to integrate with any website and make it easy to use. DASH is used on my own website and it is constantly receiving updates to make it better and better.

My personal website is one of my biggest achievements. In April 2010 I had an idea that it would be good to share what I know with the world. Because of this, I decided to open a website dedicated to both professional work and my personal life. My website went through a major refurbishment in June 2013. My website is built with my skills in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP and MySQL.

I took the hobby of programming due to my interest in it. I have developed products such as an imaging/graphics application, a web browser and an easy-to-use programming language. Nowadays I develop several large personal projects, but I also help others by writing programs to automate things for them.

I was again voted as a class representative for my one year in the Professional Graduate Diploma of Education (PGDE) course. This course is also known as teacher training. The course involves 4 modules which are all assessed at the Masters level (SCQF Level 11). I passed all modules at the Masters level. I did not pursue the Master's Degree, however.

I was the class representative in the third year and fourth year of my studies for the Computer Science degree which saw me keeping the class up to date with the latest news and events related to the university, taking up issues with staff on behalf of fellow students.

I have worked on a number of projects at university, some of which I have documented on my website.

Below is a table of my results from my modules at university.

This was an introductory course to university. LEAPS was also aimed to assist those who felt that they might not get the school grades to get into university since it would provide evidence that they have achieved success at university level. Whilst I did not need this support, it did give me a good introduction to what university was like.

I also achieved the Merit Award (given to one other) for Computer Science.

I attended Ross High School, Tranent, for the full 6 years.

Whilst at high school, particularly in my sixth year, I was an in-class support pupil who would assist teachers with their classes. My duty was in a first-year Computing class which saw me running the class in two classes as well as generally giving help to the students around the class. This was entirely voluntary and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I also was a paired-reading tutor, meaning that I was required to assist someone with lower reading capabilities than the normal levels for high school.

Below is a list of my most important school qualifications:

With this unpaid voluntary work, I was a member of a political party for a few months helping out with duties such as delivering flyers and leaflets. My role was crucial in delivering to certain areas that had been difficult to cover by the party before, due to a lack of members in the area.

I was a key member of our Young Enterprise Scotland team in charge of the IT side of the products as well as being one of the front members of the sales team. Our team managed to sell the majority of our products that were for sale and were one of the more liked teams by the public.