This week’s spotlight profiles Jordan Purinton, Computer Programmer.
Jordan grew up in Great Falls, MT. He remembers playing video games at the age of three, and learning to read by playing Pokemon. Jordan originally came to the University of Montana with an interest in the Journalism program, but soon realized that he was good with technology and intrigued by the magic of programming. So, he signed up for the Computer Science program and never looked back.
In the fall of 2016, Jordan took a semester off to intern with ESPN in Connecticut. He enjoyed working for a big company and is looking forward to doing more of that kind of programming work in the future.
When he is not programming, Jordan likes music, going to concerts, listening to podcasts, playing video games and sports.
For his senior Capstone Project, Jordan collaborated with GatherBoard and a team of students to create the GatherBoard app. The group met GatherBoard CEO Molly Bradford in the beginning of the first semester, when local business people and community members who needed software engineering came in to the classroom. Each student made a list of their top choices, and Jordan and his team got paired with GatherBoard. The team consisted of Jordan (Project Manager), Josh Gibson, Ryan Koning, Phillip Peterson, and Jasmin York (1st semester only).
The process of developing the GatherBoard App consisted of first planning and researching then building the app. In the first semester the team highlighted and prioritized the features they wanted to include, and mapped them out. Next, they researched the technologies they would use in developing those features. Then they identified how those technologies would work together. Finally, they created diagrams of what they hoped the app would look like.
During the second semester they worked on building the features and testing them to make sure that they worked as expected. The next phase was user testing. After reviewing tester questionnaires and refining the app, they demonstrated what they had created to Molly and Nick Shontz, programmer for GatherBoard, and gave a presentation to the class.
When the class graduated in the spring of 2018, the rest of the team moved on to other things. Jordan continues to work on refining the app and building more features. The targeted release date for the app is October of 2018.
Many Thanks to Jordan and his team of UM Students – you’re awesome!
