It was Kyle Hibbert’s desire to become an inventor from he was a student at Wolmer’s Prep School.  Then, he loved to create things and this passion remained with him when he entered Wolmer’s Boys’ School.  When introduced to  the programming aspect of Information Technology  (IT)  in Third Form,  he found that he grasped  it  faster than anyone  else in  his  class. IT was his best subject and he emerged top of the school for it, copping a prize for the course at his Graduation Ceremony.

Love for Concepts

His good academic showing motivated him to pursue the BSc Computer Sciences degree at The UWI, Mona, culminating in the award of a First Class Honours and a GPA of 3.79. “Constant refreshment of memory and the fact that I made a point of learning the concepts allowed me to excel. It is much harder to forget concepts than facts,” Hibbert noted. Due to his love for concepts, he totally enjoyed his two favourite computer courses – Analysis of Algorithms and Information Systems in Organizations.  “Analysis of Algorithms is based on Mathematics that deals with the manipulation of data in clever ways. It teaches you  to be really clever, to  think  in ways  that you  never  did  before  and  it  introduces you to problems you never imagined. I learned about certain problems that people, to this day, are still trying to solve,” he said.

He found  Information Systems in  Organizations  a  “very practical  course”  and  admired the teaching style of  the  lecturer,  Carl Beckford. “Mr. Beckford was so enthusiastic that the students had no choice but to share his enthusiasm. He role-played various characters using real-world examples from the corporate world. For example, during his classes, students had to play the role of  managers  and  the tutorials  were  transformed into  management meetings where we took  real life or fictional cases and found solutions,  analysed  what went wrong  or  what decisions should have been made. During those sessions, you could not tell that it was anything but a management meeting - sometimes we could prepare for it, sometimes he jumped it on us and we had 5 – 10 minutes to get what we needed for the case and be prepared,” he explained.

Artistic Expressions

Hibbert also enjoyed working on his final-year group project - a computerized, aquaponics system with remote monitoring. The system - a symbiotic relationship between a fish’s environment (a fish tank) and a gravelled grow bed – operates by physical and chemical processes. The grow bed filters the water in the fish tank, water is pumped into the grow bed and the waste from the fish provides nutrients to the plants in the grow bed.   An ultrasonic sensor, placed on top of the fish tank, detects the water level in the tank. When it is too low, it shuts off the pump and the water drips from the grow bed.  “It is a cycle of high and low – the water goes down and comes back up.  Aquaponics as a concept has been practiced in countries like Singapore for a long time. We thought of it as we wanted to make something for the home.  We regard the project as ‘a fish tank plus more’,” Hibbert said. This is one invention that Hibbert is proud of and he intends to continue to use the computer to bring his artistic expressions to the fore. He cherishes the freedom that the computer allows him to express his own ideas and plans to gain some experience in the working world before embarking on further studies. Currently, he is working at Management Cohort (MC) Systems as an intern. “Right now, I am interning for a development position. I would like to do further studies in Computer Science in the future, but  in the meantime I plan to continue working for a while before I figure out exactly what I want to study. I want to experience the field so that I can know what is there,” he said.