Contact

4th year CA projects co-ordinator for 2011-12:

• Dr. Mark Humphrys
• Module descriptor

Picking a project

A Project Proposal form signed by a member of staff is to be submitted to the box in L114 by the deadline of Tue 1 Nov 2011.

As with the 3rd year projects, you need to find a member of staff willing to supervise your project. Your project might be the staff member's idea, or your own idea, or a combination. You may need to meet with your potential supervisor a few times before they are happy with your proposal.

For help in picking a project and supervisor:

• Staff project ideas
• Staff Research Areas
• Staff Initials
• 2011 projects:
• 2010 projects:

All projects will be individual rather than group based projects.

Project Proposal form

Writing the Project Proposal:

• Project Proposal form:

When submitting your project proposal, you must include:

1. Project Title
2. General area covered by the project
3. Description of the proposed project.
   • Background - where the ideas came from
   • Achievements - what functions it provides, who the users will be
   • Justification - why/when/where/how it will be useful
4. Programming language(s) - List the proposed language(s) to be used
5. Programming tools - List tools (compiler, database, web server, etc.) to be used
6. Learning Challenges - List the main new things (technologies, languages, tools, etc) that you will have to learn
7. Hardware / software platform - State the hardware and software platform for development.
8. Special hardware / software requirements - Describe any special requirements.

In general the School of Computing is not in a position to supply and support special hardware / software for 4th year projects. Accordingly, any special needs should be provided by the students and discussed with your supervisor.

All projects must be demonstrated in a School of Computing lab, either on a lab machine or the students own machine

IBM Open Source Competition

IBM will again be running a competition for best use of Open Source code in Final year projects.

• IBM Open Source Competition
• Last year's competition:
• Last year's winner

Failure to submit Project Proposal

If I do not have a signed project proposal form by the deadline, a standard project will be assigned to you.

• Standard projects:

Functional Specification

Your Functional Specification is to be submitted to the box in L114 by the deadline of Mon 5 Dec 2011. It is very important to discuss and agree contents of the functional specification with your supervisor.

• Structure of functional spec:

Blog

You are expected to keep a blog of your work on the project across the year.

• Project blogs. (Use your Computing email, not your DCU email.)

You must list the URL of your project blog at the front of all documentation.

Supervision

You are expected to keep in contact with your supervisor on approximately a fortnightly basis, to discuss and monitor progress. It is up to you to organise such contact.

Keep in touch with your supervisor as we have found this is one of the main methods of ensuring a successful project. Almost without exception when a project fails, the supervisor tells me that they were never consulted (or only at the start). Contact with your supervisor should be reported regularly in your blog.

The other reason for regular contact is that some people have no idea of what is involved in a 4th year project and produce something well below standard, thinking it will pass. Keeping your supervisor informed and in the loop will avoid this.

You need to show you had regular contact with your supervisor. Get your supervisor to sign the following form at each meeting. Submit this with your project documentation.

• Supervision form:

Project documentation

Put your project documentation in the box in L114 before 4 pm on Mon 28 May 2012.

The project documentation should consist of two documents:

1. Technical guide to the project (motivation, research, design, implementation, problems solved, results, future work)
2. User manual (installation, user guide, screenshots)

Put project name / authors / supervisor on the front page. First page should have an abstract explaining in one paragraph the big picture of what the project does.

A full copy of all source code does not have to be included. The examiners will ask to look at your source code at the demo. They may ask to take away a copy, or they may not. You will probably want to include some source code in the technical guide to explain the implementation. But we don't need all of it.

Project demo

You must demonstrate your project during the Project Demonstration Week. (See dates below.) You will be assigned a timeslot.

Projects demos typically take 35 to 45 minutes. The project is examined and marked by 2 examiners. Usually the supervisor of the project is also present. Demos can be in any lab chosen by the student. Email supervisor and examiners in advance as to your location.

Full marks breakdown is as follows:

• Design / Implementation / Validation (60%)
• Presentation (10%)
• Documentation (10%)
• Blog (10%)
• Functional spec (10%)

Timetable

No repeats

There will be no repeat projects in 2012. The module is now designated as category II and thus we do not offer a resit for the project. If you fail, you will have to repeat the project next year.

See also:

• CA statement on plagiarism
• CA policy on Intellectual Property Rights