Helping Students Find Projects

Software	(Probably) Java and XHTML, and a database management system, optionally XML
Covers	Programming, systems design, web interface development, possibly databases
Skills Required	Programming, web-based interactive system design, perhaps some understanding of databases
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ??? Programming ????

Brief Description

If they don't have brilliant ideas of their own, MSc students and final year undergraduates in the DMU School of Computing are invited to select a topic for a final year project from hundreds of proposals put forward by dozens of lecturers. This project is (at the time of writing) the thirty-sixth proposed by Martin Stacey. How on earth are you meant to find the one that best suits your skills, interests and ambitions?

The aim of this project is to develop a web-based system, to be included (if it works well enough) in the CPRJ 3051 web site, that helps students find project proposals that are likely to suit them. The system should enable lecturers to create very brief descriptions of their projects accompanied by keywords and ratings of how challenging they are along a number of dimensions, plus the URLs of full descriptions, and enter them in a database. It should enable students to search the database for projects that suit their requirements.

Variants

One sensible way to store projects would be as XML documents using specially defined markup tags, that can then be used both for database lookups and displayed directly as web pages.

An alternative approach to the problem would be to connect the student-usable search engine to a web crawler that searches through the project proposal directories in the web spaces of all the School of Computing's lecturers (there is already a standard location for these, so it's feasible), and reads the project proposal web pages looking for keywords. The power of such a system would be greatly enhanced if it employed conventions for including challenge-ratings (etc) in the project descriptions (maybe this would be a good idea anyway).

Extension

If you want to include an AI component in your project, you could add a module for assessing the suitability of projects for students (according to the search criteria and preferences they enter), and listing them in rank order. This could be made as complex as you like - such a mechanism could start simple, but there's infinite scope for adding sophistication.

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