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.