posted 9 years ago
I'm not sure what the difference is between Computer Engineering and any other computing discipline, but the best projects in my final year were usually way out of the ordinary.
One guy made software that, when combined with some kind of device on his laptop, turned the entire screen into a touchscreen. I think that was the highest-marked project of the year. Another made an Android app that used Google Maps and Augmented Reality to show you where shops/amenities were on your camera, so you could walk straight up to them using the phone as a visual aid. He did really well too and got a distinction overall (70%+, the highest grade you can get).
The best in my course was a website that let you make your videogame levels (It was a 2D platformer with a tonne of JQuery in it). I can't remember the language he used, but he taught himself all of the JQuery, which probably had a lot to do with it. He was really, really, REALLY good with websites too, which definitely helped him.
Other ones I remember were a golf app on Android, a stock-taking app on android with a web service, a website geared towards hotel owners that let you build your own website, a workload-organiser for companies, a digital comic (from a multimedia student. I don't think it got great marks.), games made in Unity from the Entertainment Systems students and so on.
Games from other years that were shown to use all as examples included a blackjack app on Android and another Android app that used my countries official bus services API to tell users where the closest bus stations were, when they were leaving, etc. That last one was particularly great and the guy has been an Android developer at a pretty good company for some time now.
It seems like most Android projects did really well, come to think of it.
Also, the reason I say that the best ones were really out there is that the ones that played it safe generally got either average or poor marks. My own one didn't get great marks because I didn't put enough effort into the planning part of it the semester beforehand. That, and my lecturer admitted that he was giving me more negative feedback than he let on when it was all over. I had completely burned out halfway through the semester because he had convinced me that I was going to fail. I ended up with a fifty for my project in the end, but the rest of my marks dragged my average way up to almost seventy. Moral of the story: learn to manage negative feedback!
The best advice I can give you on doing well for this project is:
-If you have a summer holiday before the semester begins, get an internship and get them to give you as much responsibility regarding development as possible. You can't put yourself under the same pressure a job will put you under, so you NEED this experience to get really good.
-Either make the project an Android app that provides some brilliant form of convenience for users, an Android app that provides users with very high-quality fun (We're talking "paid apps" level here) or something that is completely off-the-wall with a high chance of failure. On that last one, I never would have done the same project as the guy who did the touch-screen project. I just wasn't that confident in my ability at the time. And if he wasn't, he wouldn't have finished the project. And if he didn't, he probably would have failed the year since the project was a doubly-weighted module.
So yeah, work hard!
