CC301-6-FY: Overview and Initial Proposal

As part of your final year’s work, you will be required to undertake an individual project. This provides an opportunity for you to develop the skills that are deemed important by your future employers, by the research community and by professional bodies such as the British Computer Society (BCS). These notes are intended to give you some general information, and some advice about the first submission, the initial proposal, which must be handed in to the General Office on Wednesday of the second week of the Autumn Term.

• Aims and Objectives:
  The final year project is an opportunity:
  1. to show that you can independently plan, conduct, report and present a complete piece of work;
  2. to demonstrate your knowledge of Computer Science and your skills in hardware/software development.
• Assessment
  The project counts as a double module and contributes 25% of your final year mark. It will be assessed by means of staged deliverables which include a project plan, a project report and a presentation. A complete timetable for the submission of each component will be made available at the start of the Autumn Term.

At the beginning of the Autumn Term you will be allocated a supervisor whose task is to help you with the management of your project. Supervision will be conducted either in group sessions or individual meetings.

Regular attendance at supervision meetings is essential and will be monitored.

Your supervisor’s primary task is to guide you through the process of conducting the project, rather than to provide detailed technical instruction. Although every attempt is made to allocate you to a supervisor with relevant expertise, it is important to realise that solving technical problems is part of your overall task. Most of the time you will be expected to do this by yourself, drawing on knowledge gained from your taught courses and your own further reading.

You will be expected to maintain a paper-based log book of your activities. This should be a bound book, not a loose-leave file. The department can provide a suitable book. A regular "exercise book" would also suffice. (If you have problems writing or drawing, then you may glue print outs of your activites into an A4 size exercise book.)

The log book should be shown to your supervisor at your regular meetings. Your supervisor may sign your log book as part of the supervisory monitoring process. You will also be asked to submit your log book with your final report. It will be used to help assess the management of your project.

You may choose any topic that is related to your scheme of study. When making your choice, you should bear in mind the following points:

1. Endorsement students (G600, G700, G467 and G4N1) must choose a topic that is based in their specialist area.
2. Your topic should enable you to demonstrate Computer Science skills that you have gained during your degree studies.
3. It is not necessary to go outside the taught syllabus in order to obtain a very good mark, but extra credit can be gained if you show initiative in researching and gaining expertise in areas which lie outside the syllabus.

You may already have an idea for your project—or you may not! If you need some inspiration, check out the following links on the CC301 web page at http://courses.essex.ac.uk/cc/cc301/.

If you follow the ‘Past Projects’ link from that page you will find lists of titles of projects from previous years. There are also brief abstracts of some that scored well, and complete final reports of some that gained distinctions.

If you follow the ‘Project Ideas’ link you will find some ideas suggested by members of for projects that they have supervised or would like to supervise. These pages will be updated continually over the summer period, so it’s worth checking regularly.

A major component of your project is the implementation. It is a good idea to decide upon your hardware/software platform at an early stage since this can affect your overall system design. Please note the following points:

1. Out-of-date and poorly maintained development environments may give rise to problems when tackling a large piece of work.
2. Problems with your own equipment, or lack of back-up facilities, cannot be regarded as grounds for extensions to deadlines, or as extenuating circumstances with regard to your final mark.
3. The Department’s laboratories are equipped to a high standard and are maintained by a team of experienced technical staff. In the unlikely event of machine failures in the Department’s laboratories, any time lost will be taken into consideration.

You are strongly advised to develop your final year project in the Department’s laboratories. We can usually provide you with the necessary software, and have facilities for setting up non-standard systems (contact Kevan Wilding at kwilding@essex.ac.uk if you need advice). Bear in mind that at the end of the year you will be required to demonstrate your system here in the Department.

You are required to submit your initial proposal by Wednesday of the second week of the Autumn Term. The proposal should be no longer than 3 sides of A4, and should contain:

1. The title of your project, your name, your supervisor’s name.
2. A description of your proposed project and the hardware/software platform you intend to use.
3. A section describing any background study you have undertaken or may have to undertake. This might include research into the problem domain, user requirements, and familiarisation with new programming languages, operating systems, development environments and so on.
4. A section listing the taught modules (2nd and final year) that are most relevant to your topic.
5. A list of references that are relevant to the project you propose.

Your proposal will be considered by the course supervisor, and may be altered or vetoed entirely if it is considered to be unsuitable (e.g. over-ambitious, or not relevant to your degree studies, or involving insufficient Computer Science).

After your experiences in CC201, you will have come to realise that good planning is the key to a successful project. In the first half of the Autumn term, you will be required to submit a plan for your final year individual project. The planning task is slightly different (e.g. no skills audit or task allocation) but you will be asked to provide a Work Breakdown and a schedule in the form of a Gantt chart.

Some of you will already have gained practice in the use of project management software—if you haven’t, then you should consider investing some time in learning how to use such tools. The main CC301 web page has a section about software and tutorials for project management.

Your project doesn’t have to be at the frontiers of research in order to gain a good mark—for example, a competently engineered piece of application software is perfectly adequate. Whatever you choose to do, your project is potentially the most rewarding piece of work that you will undertake at University. It could also turn out to be an important step towards a successful career, so take some time out to think about it over the summer.