DIM3/ITECH students show off their Web Apps
On the 12th and 13th of March computing science students from DIM3 and ITECH showcased their web start-ups. As part of these courses students learnt about the fundamentals of web development and how to specify, design and develop complex and distributed web-based applications. The also used a range of technologies in developing their applications including Django, a python based web application framework, Javascript and the JQuery library as well as using CSS Toolkits such as Twitter’s Bootstrap and Zurb’s Foundation. Students were able to deploy their applications use Amazon Web Services via the Amazon Education Grant Scheme, while JetBrain’s provided students with Educational Licenses for their Python IDE pyCharm. These technologies and tools enabled the students to rapidly build professional and high quality applications.
Over 35 teams created various apps ranging from web based games like “Terror in the Boyd Orr” where players had to avoid being eaten by zombies to more practical sites such as “Billboard for Bands” which let venues post slots for gigs and let bands apply for gigs.
During the final lab sessions each team demonstrated their application to industry representatives from Airpoint (Matt Dooner), Amazon (Fergus Burns), Kana (Douglas Johnson) and SkyScanner (Doug Dowie). After an initial round of judging, a number of teams were selected to present their work to the entire audience and all the judges in an X-Factor manner. While applications impressed the judges, they selected the following applications as their favourites. Matt Dooner from Airpoint commented that, “We awarded prizes to those teams who went above and beyond the requirements of the assignment demonstrating a genuine interest in software development.”
From the third year class DIM3, with prizes sponsored by Airpoint and Kana for the best apps were:
Clik.cx (Sean Galbraith, Robert Clipsham, Daniel McElroy): a URL shortening service with a twist by making a game out of the clicking links. By gamifying the service a fun element was introduced which gave the application more appeal, than simply using bit.ly, for example.
Battlecodes.co.uk (Andrew Gardner, James MacDonald, Jamie Johnston): a coding game that tests how good you are at solving problems using Python. Particularly impressed by this app, Doug from SkyScanner noted that, “This project could easily be used not only in the classroom to help teach programming, but also used during the interview process for hiring programmers as a more fun version of `whiteboard’ coding.”
Civilian (Ryan Wells, Fiona Buyers, Christopher James): an online game where you join a faction and build your empire by investing in science, military, art, farming and housing. Not only had this team developed a fully functioning game but they also took the time to create a unique visual identity for their application. This took the form of artwork they made for each of the playing styles you could pick for your faction.
Other notable applications were AutoShelve: an inventory management system for resturants, Coco&Co: a novel opinion based discussion forum, MusicScout: a app for following your favourite artists and tracking their previous and latest releases, and TypeClub: a multiplayer game that tests how fast you can type.
From the masters class ITECH, with prizes sponsored by Airpoint and Amazon, the best apps were:
Flat Organizer (Benjamin Behm, Haakon Sonsteby, Daniel Abrahamsen): a web app to designed to help ensure domestic bliss in shared accommodation, providing users with task lists and shopping lists.
Student Sofa Guest (Yunze Zhai, Juntao Yu, Yifan Bai): a really neat app designed to help students from different university’s find a sofa to sleep on when visiting different cities.
e-Playground (Scott McFarlane, Lynne Roper, Christina Balmer): an application that lets parents quickly and easily customize a web page for their children to play games and watch videos.
Other notable applications were: GroupCraft: which lets users create and manage volunteer groups. Doug from SkyScanner noted that, “What impressed me about their project was the way that they created a very visually appealing website which a strong focus on how the users would interact with their site. They also had implemented searching and an HTML 5 feature where word-clouds of keywords was shown matching the group you were currently looking at or just trending terms.”
MapMyPlayList: an app that integrates with LastFM and dbpedia to visualize your playlist and your friend’s playlists by mapping artists to their home cities. This application came about from the student’s desire to have fun; and to combine and share their interests of music with friends. The interactive map encouraged you to explore your playlists and your friends playlists in an engaging manner.
Chairmore: a search vertical to help users find the perfect chair, couch or sofa. Doug from SkyScanner noted that the, “most exciting part of their system was being able to browse by clicking on the images to find similar ones - so if you saw a chair you liked clicking on it would create a new query and provide you with a new set of results showing similar chairs. Everything was tracked on their site in terms of clicks, so this could easily be extended into a viable commercial project with companies working with them to sell their products in a way that easily allows customers to find their perfect chair.”
Matt Dooner commented that these courses teach students fundamental skills, which are valuable for them gaining placements and engaging with industry. By undertaking a more disciplined approach to design students were able rapidly develop solutions.
This was re-iterated by Team Civilian who commented that, “the main lesson reinforced through development was that a comprehensive and thoughtful design phase enables a much faster and more technically accurate implementation.”
Another team that made a Trivia Game based on time periods highlighted the useful of the course, “The project as well as the whole course in general gave the team an excellent introduction into web application development, distributed systems and architecture patterns. It proved both a good revision on Python and a useful learning experience for a future career in the exciting areas of web computing and cloud services.”
Doug Dowie from SkyScanner said that he found the standard of both the third year and master’s projects very impressive; both in terms of the range of ideas on show as well as the work by all those involved to develop them using a variety of technologies and libraries. And added that “the students were all very enthusiastic about their ideas and enjoyed showing off their work from the last few weeks. It was great to see so many up-and-coming software engineers picking up lots of new skills, learning new languages (Python, JavaScript) in addition to finding external libraries to make use and mastering all of this in such a short period of time.”
On reflection of the course and the outcomes, Dr Azzopardi, the course coordinator, said that he was quite impressed with the quality and diversity of the projects. He felt that the students clearly learnt many new skills and hopefully learnt some life long lessons in how to properly deal with integrating technologies, how to overcome complexity within distributed systems, and how to design web applications. He also commented that "It was also evident to me that because the students were intrinsically motivated in their projects that they went the extra mile to deliver a working product."
"Finally, I would like to thank all our industrial sponsors for their time and effort over the course of the demo days. And in particularly, thank Amazon for providing thousands of pounds of Amazon Web Service credit to host applications and JetBrains for providing PyCharm licenses. I would also like to commend the students for putting in so much effort to developing some really cool apps – it made the course much more enjoyable and really impressed the industry representatives." - Dr Leif Azzopardi