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.
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  Appleby Town Council Website