Student Projects
A significant amount of your work will be project-based teamwork, tackling real problems. This starts right at the beginning of your studies with the first-year team project. A major activity in the third year of all our courses is the project. Unlike the team projects in years one and two, the third-year project is an individual piece of work, often involving the construction of a significant piece of software or hardware.
First-year team projects
All our students undertake a team project in their first year. This project is designed to help you develop the independent and team-working skills that are essential for any successful student. The final project deliverable is a database-driven website for an application entirely chosen by the group. Previous examples have included: sites to support people building their own computers; 'Grub on A Grant'; a site to support an existing artist's business; and a site on which you can plan your own funeral!
Daniel Drake's Project Profile
Biometric authentication and fingerprint recognition technologies were once the stuff of Bond movies and spy fiction. However, such technologies are now increasingly prevalent in the mobile computing market and became the focus of an undergraduate project by CS graduate Daniel.
Daniel's project, 'fprint', enables fingerprint
scanners to be used simply and efficiently on the
open-source operating system Linux. Where
previously individual scanners were supported by
their own drivers and API (Application
Programming Interface), Daniel created 'libfprint',
a standardised API that works with a whole host
of different fingerprint readers. In doing so, he has
made previously unusable hardware available to
Linux users, generating a sizable user base and
significant media interest in the process. Daniel's
work plugs a gap in the Open Source desktop and
is now available via SourceForge.
Undertaken by Daniel Drake,
BSc Computer Science. 
Third-year projects
Each student has a member of staff as their personal supervisor, and they have weekly project meetings together. In the descriptions of degree courses that follow, we give an example of a project that might be appropriate for students on each course. You can also get a better idea of what is involved in a third-year project by watching the student project video below.
