University of Cumbria Computing and Business projects 2013-14

We have moved into a new Computing facility this year based at Paternoster Row in Carlisle City Centre which is situated in the new Business Interaction Centre. This year the students have been presented with projects sponsored mainly by clients internal to the University (the news of past success is spreading internally!).

• The first project group this year will be using the Lego Mindstorms kit to develop a remotely operated Robotic Avatar. The principle will be similar to the iPad controlled robot shown at TED in February 2013. Ideally the Avatar will display the face of the remote operator on a screen and show a live video and audio feed back to the operator. Think Skype mounted on a remotely controlled vehicle!
• A second project team will be aiming to do something new with freely available open data. This will either have a social enterprise focus or provide some way of generating revenue from such data. The actual task to be achieved and the data to be used is completely open to the students to choose! The early stages are therefore focussing on identifying the range and scope of data sets that are available as well as looking at potential markets and uses for such data.
• The third team this year are working with the Faculty of Health and Science at the University of Cumbria to develop an interactive teaching / assessment tool based around the creation of region tags, time tags and observational recording of videos. The aim is to produce a tool which educators can use to drop in a video and then identify key things in that video (by time, by a specific region in some frames for example). the video can then be watched by a student and their interactions recorded and an assessment / feedback provided on their performance.

The Business School are also running a pilot project this year of the client-led project (we call it the Consultancy Project) on one of the Business Programmes. More details to follow on this as the project takes shape.

University of Cumbria Applied Computing Final year Projects 2012-13, Final Comments

Another successful year for the student projects on the BSc Applied Computing programme at the University of Cumbria.

• The Rocket Consulting Project this year went well and led to a graduate being offered a permanent job with the company. The students developed a fully working system to read data posted to a mobile phone from a 'black box' recording device on a vehicle. The data could then be used to analyse driver performance and identify periods of heavy braking, heavy acceleration, rapid fuel loss or idling for long periods of time. All of this could be used to assist drivers in becoming more efficient with their driving and ultimately save fuel and running costs of the vehicles. 
• The Council Geo-location App team did well too, they managed to get their App to a point where it was functioning, identifying the location of the user, enabling photographs to be uploaded and type of problem to be reported. This was a big improvement on the previous year group who had done al great deal of the groundwork but had some vital bits of functionality missing. Unfortunately the Council haven't taken the opportunity to take the system further themselves! 
• The School Website team did a very good job of understanding the requirements of their clients (pupils at the primary school and also the teaching staff). They produced two websites, one based on Moodle for the educational aspects and on based on simple HTML and CSS that would enable the school (Newtown primary school in Carlisle, Cumbria) to promote itself more effectively. 
• Project Worm Hole worked with an ex-graduate of the University to produce an educational game based on textual input, simple graphics and puzzles that addressed aspects of the national curriculum at key stages 1 and 2. The students managed to produce one complete level of the game, which included several puzzle elements. They also planned out some further levels that could be developed in the future. 

The future...... 

The client-led project has been so successful with the students, the staff and the clients that the model is being extended to run across the entire undergraduate Business School portfolio at the University of Cumbria. This will enable larger teams consisting of students from a range of disciplines to be able to collaborate on more complex, client led projects.

Student Projects 2012-13 - Update December 2012.

A few weeks into the project module for 2012-13 and the student groups have all been matched up with their respective clients. We have four groups this year and the projects are as follows:

• Rocket Consulting Ltd. return for their fourth year of collaborative projects. This time around the students are being exposed not only tow Rocket’s business but also to some of their clients. The aim is to develop mobile device applications that can improve the type and quality of information available for transport managers and drivers on vehicle efficiency and utilisation. This is a complex project involving several different technologies (hardware and software). As usual, full support is being provided by Rocket Consulting, a more detailed Blog entry on the project is available on Rocket’s Blog. 
• Carlisle City Council return for their second year of student projects. The aim this year is to take the prototype application developed last year for reporting defects to the Council to a more complete and implementable solution. This will involve collaboration between the five district councils in Cumbria and the County Council. The project aims to develop a mobile app and website to enable members of the public to report various defects such as Potholes or Graffiti. the app will use geo-location on the mobile device to determine which council to send the defect report to, the defect type will then further identify the actual team to send the defect to. Last years prototype is being used as a starting point so many of the technology choices and difficulties have already being overcome, the main problem this year will be getting the device installed and then adopted by the appropriate IT teams within the Council services. 
• A past graduate of mine from a previous course has returned to act as a client for a team developing a interactive adventure game that is aimed at children. The idea is to develop a game that requires team-working, problem solving and understanding of several curriculum areas. The game will be simple, web based and contain several levels of difficulty aligned with the appropriate subjects and levels identified in the national curriculum. 
• The final project for this year is to develop and build an interactive learning enabled website for a primary school in Carlisle. In this project the primary school pupils are acting as the client, their teachers are merely supervising. The teaching staff want to make more use of the web, not only for promoting their school but also to engage the pupils in extra curricular learning, classroom activities and also to develop their digital skills. Moodle is likely to be the Virtual Learning Environment on which the new site will be based and the student group have to work out which of the many requests coming from the client can be provided in the time available.

University of Cumbria, Student Projects 2012-13

Clients coming back for more….

2012 looks to be an exciting year for the Applied Computing students. We have 11 projects on offer to our final year students from 5 different clients.  Several clients have returned to us from last year with new projects, a great indicator of the success in 2011-12.  Some interesting ideas coming from Rocket Consulting Ltd. looking at ways to get the most of Mobile Apps and SAP back end systems.  Cumbria County Council and Carlisle City Council are with us again this year with more community focussed ideas and also a project to take last years Location Based defect reporting Mobile App through to a releasable product.  We also have a past graduate of our returning to us with a project idea as a client, something involving the Raspberry Pi……watch this space.
There will be more updates on this and updates on progress over the coming weeks as students choose / get chosen for their respective projects.

University of Cumbria, Student Projects 2011-12

Student Projects 2011-12

2011-12 has been a very busy year for the BSc Applied Computing students at the University of Cumbria.  Student projects were running for year 2 and year 3 students, all of which have been with real clients on real projects.

Starting with the smaller, year 2 projects.

• Students joined forces with Cumbria County Council and have produced an e-learning guide to the European Union.  They have had to use a bespoke tool to develop SCORM content for inclusion in the local government e-learning system, Learning Pool.
• Another year 2 group have been working with the technical team for the Universities Computing provision  (in the Business School) and developing a new Linux image, based on Fedora 16, to be distributed across the computers in the Linux lab.  This has required the students to learn about NFS file systems, NIS network authentication protocols and DRBL and Clonezilla for image distribution.
• A third group of students have been working with a local web entrepreneur to develop a way to list affiliate links to bookable holiday cottages on his lake district walks website. This will enable visitors to the site to book holiday cottages through Cottages4you and thus generate some revenue as a result.  The students have had to learn a great deal about XML and Wordpress to get this working but seem to have done a good job. The client is very happy with the result.

The final year projects this year have been extremely successful.

• Students have collaborated with Rocket Consulting Ltd. to work with Lego Mindstorms to create a model warehouse to pull data from SAP Extended Warehouse Management systems. Read more on Rocket's blog about this project. We also took a video of the SAP / Lego in action.

• Development of a mobile Application to enable members of the public to report to the relevant council / authority problems such as graffiti, acts of vandalism, potholes in the road, littering etc. BBC News picked up on this project and their brief report can be read online.

• Work has been done with the Councils in Cumbriato expose transport data to Google Transit and thus enable searches for bus routes to be made more easily.  This work has been received very well by the council and will hopefully lead to a placement for some students to implement the project in full.
• A group of students have been working with a recent Marketing graduate form the University to realise his business idea.  This has required the specification and implementation of a completely bespoke computer system that will enable small restaurant businesses to access services that larger chains are able to such as monitoring of meals sold against time of year, customer profiles and seasonal variations.
• A group of students have been working with a small retail business based in Ambleside to establish an e-commerce facility for their pet and gift shop.  The website is due to go live shortly and a link will be included accordingly.
• Finally a group of students have worked with staff from Appleby Town council to develop a website that will enable them to manage the content themselves.  Previous sites have been difficult to maintain and as a result become out of date.  The produced site is built using a standard and widely support Content Management System and the staff have been given full training in its use.
• 
  

  Appleby Town Council Website