A former West College Scotland student has been awarded ‘Young Scottish Software Developer of the Year’ at Scotland’s leading tech conference, Scotsoft.

Stuart Adams, 22, was awarded the coveted prize for the exceptional work detailed in his university honours project. Stuart’s project, ‘Real Time Physically Based Rendering’, was based around implementing the advanced shading effects that are used in modern video games.

 Stuart commented, ‘the judges mentioned that the quality of the engineering stood out. I had studied a number of papers that graphics programmers had published, and I looked to build an implementation of what they had written because there aren’t that many out there at the moment.”

Stuart highlighted that the practical skills and programming experience he had developed whilst studying at the College had prepared him for such advanced work at university.

“The College brought in a lot of people from industry who had a lot of practical experience with programming. I ended up working very closely with a lot of those people – they really helped mentor me and taught me how to program properly.”

Stuart had plenty of praise for the Computer Games Development course at the College. He placed particular emphasis on how well the College challenges students with coursework, saying, ‘You got the chance to make something creative that addressed the specification you had been given. It was an opportunity to express myself.’ Stuart created entire games on his own during his studies at WCS.

Since graduating from the College, Stuart has completed his BSc (Hons) Computer Games Technology at the University of the West of Scotland and secured himself employment with the internationally recognised Scottish software company, Codeplay.