LBSC 690 Term Projects

Project Goal 

Dr Oard gives a very good description about the purpose of the term project in LBSC 690. I cite his words here:

“The project in LBSC 690 is designed to allow students to integrate and extend knowledge acquired throughout the course and to apply that knowledge to solve a problem of substantial scope. Students are required to work in groups of 3, and teams should plan to devote approximately 125 hours outside of class to the project over the course of the semester (6 hours per person for 7 weeks). Except in unusual circumstances, all team members should be registered for the same section of LBSC 690. Experience suggests that successful teams require expertise in design, implementation, and project management. “

Project requirements (technology side)

We have discussed the requirements of the projects on the class. Here I will only state again the requirements related to the technology side. That is that the projects required to make substantial use of at least two of the key technologies introduced in the course, integrated in a manner that is appropriate for their intended application:

Web-based content delivery

Synchronized multimedia content delivery

Programming (JavaScript)

Relational Databases

Projects are also required to include significant real content; mock-ups that contain only a limited quantity of content for demonstration purposes would not be acceptable.

Project report

After consideration of pros and cons, I decided that each team will produce only one single written report, due on December 10. Dr Oard gave a very detailed description about what information should be included in the report. The following list of requirements is based on Dr Oard’s description, and is aimed for our section. They should be viewed as a list of aspects that should be covered by the report, not necessarily corresponding to sections and section headings in the report.

1)      Motivation: What motivated you to choose this topic? Do the project actually try to resolve a real problem or a make-up one? 

2)      Approach design. How did you approach the problem? How did you identify what technologies to use and how they should be used?

3)      Implementation. How did you implement each module, and the whole system? No need to go into too much detail here.

4)      Evaluation. Have you done any evaluation? How did you test the system if the answer of the previous question is yes? How well do you know that the system meet its design goal?  What insights have you learned from the testing?

5)      Discussion. What have you learned about the nature of the problem? What have you learned about the capabilities and limitations of the technologies that you chose to work with?

6)      Collaboration. How did you worked as a team? Who had done what in the process? Each team member should write one or two paragraphs about his/her contribution to the project in “who have done what” part.

7)      Future work.  Do you have any plan to continually work on this project? If yes, what areas are you going to work on? Will there some customer adopt it?

 The project report should be clearly presented, but also concise. There is no requirement on page limit. However, since report will be one of the two major sources for me to judge your project (the other one is demonstration), failing to provide a clear picture in the report about what you have done in the project could have unfortunate consequence to your project scores. 

Demonstration

Each team also requires to give a 30-minute demonstration. All demonstrations should be given on Sunday December 14 or Monday December 15. The time of demonstrations is set based on appointment. Each team should provide two preferred time slots to Dr He, and Dr He will based on his timetable and the teams’ preferred slots to arrange a time table of demonstrations. 

Words to remember

Dr Oard raised a very important issue in designing and completing the term projects. His words are “It is important that the chosen project be sufficiently substantial to represent a significant accomplishment, but that it not be so complex that completion within the available time would be unlikely. Teams may select any topic for their project, but they should be careful to select a project for which the required content can be obtained in the available time.” Just remember, good is better than bad, and bad is better than nothing here.

Written by Daqing He Thursday, November 20, 2003