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.