A major component of the course is the development of a group software project. This semester I will serve as the principal client for some projects while I've lined up actual clients for other projects. There are six potential projects:
The Undergraduate Research Project Management System was developed by the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship in conjunction with the Task Force on Undergraduate Research and Scholarship. The system is a public, online database of faculty research projects that involve undergraduates as part of the research team. It is intended both to inform students, colleagues, and the community about UAA's undergraduate research projects, and to build support for more initiatives in this area.
The current website was mostly written by multiple previous teams of students with some hacks by your instructor to get it running. While functional, it has reached the point where the code is a mess and the whole site needs to be re-written, ideally using some jQuery or Dojo or some other more modern JavaScript library. The database is mostly intact with some modifications for user accounts.
See: http://ugresearch.uaa.alaska.edu to visit the site.
The system is written in PHP with a mysql backend and runs on our Unix system, bigmazzy.
At this point not a very fleshed-out project, but the basic idea is to provide end-to-end routing information for PeopleMover. While the muni has some nice tools to see where buses are on a map, there is not a good tool to tell a person what buses to take to get from Point A to Point B. The idealized version would be like directions on Google Maps for PeopleMover.
Also not very fleshed-out at this point, we recently purchased a Polhemus G4 3D digitizer for a research project to determine if the minute motions in how we sit in a chair can be used to idenfity/authenticate a user. This is a bit more open-ended as a research project. Other projects might be possible.
This is a project with a real client! The ASD hopes to get this project live in about a year. The ASD has hired 4-5 of our graduates so this might have a good chance of landing you a job in the future and is pretty representative of jobs many CS graduates get in Anchorage.
The project is to make an online version of a student's portfolio. Currently the process is done by submitting a word processing file. The school district would like to convert this to an online form (which makes it editable from Macs or PCs) where the portfolio could be output ideally in RTF (or PDF) where sections can be selected to be included or hidden. Many fields for the portfolio would be grabbed from the school district's database. ASD will provide a dataset of dummy data.
ASD requests this project be built in .NET (ASP.NET, likely a C# back end).
Another project with a real client! Brian Walch from RDI is the client for a website where pilots can share information about airport and off-airport locations.
Another project with a real client! John Olofsson from the civil engineering department is the client for a system to model and visualize various water/wastewater systems.