We were delighted to welcome back Mount Old Scholar Katie Fisher (2010) who had a fantastic chat with Senior girls about career options for Games Design, Programming and Software Engineering.
Katie is Lead Developer at Wren Kitchens, heading a team of 14 programmers ranging from Maths-oriented programmers (ie Maths is very much their strong point) to narrative-oriented designers (ie Maths is very much not their strong point). The main programmes her team uses to render customer kitchen designs represent the infrastructure underpinning Game Design.
On finished College II and accepting a place to study for a Biomedical Sciences degree, Katie realised in her third year that BioMed was not for her. She paused, reflected and, realising how much she enjoyed gaming, opted for a Computer Science degree which offered modules in Game Design. “The very first line of code I ever wrote was in my first week of the first year of my Computer Science degree,” she told the girls. The possibility of becoming a Games Designer was not common knowledge in the late ‘noughties’. Nowadays, most of the Junior School have excellent basic skills for programming, and the Senior girls have all worked with software like Scratch and Python.
She talked with girls about some open-source software that is readily available online which they can use free of charge to design their own games. “If you work as a software developer, you will never not be able to find a job,” she told them, later adding, “We need many, many more women and people of diverse backgrounds to work in software design.”
Katie’s talk had been scheduled during Careers Week, but a bout of covid meant needing to delay a week. We look forward to welcoming Katie back in September for an exciting workshop for Mount girls and guest schools in celebration of International Programmers’ Day.
