CACI has been providing a week of work experience for computing students at Callywith College in Bodmin for the past four years. The projects established by CACI provide students with the opportunity to develop valuable computational skills. The work experience encourages students to showcase some of the APIs offered by the Met Office, given CACI’s involvement with aspects of them as part of various Rowe and CNI projects. Students this year made use of the Global Spot API that is available via Weather DataHub on the Met Office website.
Callywith College students’ task for 2025
During summer 2021, the RNLI saved the highest number of lives during water sport incidents in 19 years. As a result, the brief for the students was to create a prototype website that promotes safety in the water, with a key focus on checking the conditions beforehand, which is where the Met Office Open APIs come in. Instructions on how to access the Global Spot API via Weather DataHub were provided as a starting point. The students had to piece together the code to be able to make the relevant decisions for the data they required.
Getting started was a challenge, since many of the students hadn’t heard of an API or used JavaScript before. The course instructors guided the students through the opening phase of their project. After seeing the wide range of services offered by the Met Office, the students soon became increasingly ambitious with their plans.
An interesting observation during the week was how widely AI is used by students. It’s the first resource they go to when there’s a concept they don’t understand, instead of a more traditional Google search. The various tools were great for providing a starting point to get the students up and running. The downside of these tools on the other hand was that a couple of the teams just let AI do everything.
How CACI supported the process
Justin Turner, senior technical consultant at CACI, supported the students throughout the course. Going desk to desk, he was able to support the students, provide guidance and assess their development throughout. “I really enjoyed it and it was brilliant to see the students, many of whom were reticent to get involved at first, embrace the challenge, learn new skills and apply them to the task,” says Justin. “It was rewarding to see how much they could achieve in a short space of time and to hear their positive feedback at the conclusion of the task. Hopefully it highlighted to them how much they are capable of achieving and encouraged them to take up further opportunities. The task itself and the concept of doing a presentation at the end of the week was initially daunting for many, so hopefully the experience has provided a confidence boost too.”
Enhancing presentation skills
The Callywith College students had to present their projects at the end of the week so we could decide who the prize should be awarded to. This was the first presentation many of the students had done, another important experience for them.
It was great to see the work the students had produced, with many going above and beyond the brief. One team periodically retrieved data from the API for several fixed locations and cached them in a database for efficiency, while the winning team put data from the response into a formula to get a score for how suitable the conditions are for certain water sports. Deciding on a winner was extremely tough and there was a lot of deliberation beforehand.
The value of new experiences
CACI is keen to support more colleges and students in this way. By bringing this group of students together for a week, it was great to see them embrace new challenges whilst learning valuable news skills in coding and presenting.
Get in touch with our team to discover how CACI delivers real-world impact through secure, scalable solutions built for mission-critical environments.