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.