FYP Project Ideas

 

Please Note: These are idea 'stubs' it is up to you to realise these projects, I am more than happy to help with the requirements of analysis, but it's up to you to do the rest.

 

Knowledge Visualisations

Creating Visualisations in the knowledge domain is a very interesting and fun challenge, with the advent of tools like Adobe Flex visualisations are a bit easier to create, but the hard bit is conveying a clear meaning using these visualisations.

One visualisation that I would be very interested in seeing get created is a tool that allows students to project a course pathway through a modularised course, so lety's say you want to do a degree part-time over 6 years, give them a visual representation of which modules they will be doing in each of the six years.

Another project to look at would concern the use of Word Clouds to visualisation tagging, and to measure conceptual drift.

Another project concerns the visualisation of how wikipedia articles can over time, this would be based on a previous student;s work available here (please note the tool will take a minute to load);

http://www.comp.dit.ie/dt217/jwang/contribution.html

 

iPhone Apps: Augmented Reality

There are a range of ways the Apple iPhone can be used to generate nice apps that concern augmented reaility, if you have access to an iPhone and would like to do something in AR, let me know

 

Nice Augmented reality pool demo in the following video, about two minutes into the video it gets good -- could be a cool iPhone app??

Building eLearning Tools

There are a number of topics that I would like build an eLearning Tools for, the kind of thing I am thinking of is as follows: http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/Toolkit/Tools/SeeSort.exe So you would be required to build a tool like this and create a website to accompany it. You would have to be able to justify your design choices based on some teaching or learning theory. The topics I am thinking of are;

There would be a web site to go along with each tool, and each tool could be added to the NDLR.

 

The Heraclitus Mosiac

The great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus is said to have written one of the most important philosophical books that mankind ever produced. Unfortunately, no copies of this book survive, but what does is about 100 fragments from the book quoted in other sources. Today's philosophers each have their own views on how these fragements fits together and what the themes of Heraclitus' book were. This project seeks to create a database of these quotes that is queriable on the basis of a word or theme and presents the relevant quotes. Additionally this tool should allow a user to group quotes together based on their own views of how the fragements link together into chapters, and explore the quotes (a la http://tcup.currentform.com/explore.php). Would require a student willing to study 2500 year old philosophy with good database and user interface design skills, and an ability to discuss issues such are information represention, data storage, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus

http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/Lectures/Hum1/030926/030926hum.htm

 

Building Learning Objects

This project is to investigate and develop a series of Learning Objects (a unit of educational content delivered via the internet), using eith the IMS Content Packaging or the SCORM (Sharable Content Objective Reference Model) standard. As well as having the standard learning object parameters, the learning objects for this project will be aware of how learning style can effect presentation means.

 

Swarm Intelligence

This project is to investigate and develop a model of swarm intelligence. The basic architecture of a swarm is the simulation of collections of concurrently interacting agents: with this architecture, you can implement a large variety of agent based models.

 

Debugging Ubuntu

Ubuntu is free and open source Linux-based operating system, meaning users are free to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software under the terms of the GNU GPL license. Bugs are constantly being discovered in Ubuntu, as they are in any operating system. The objective of the project would be for each group to identify 10 really good bugs and develop some solutions for them.

 

Computer Simulations

Developing graphical simulations of ancient computers using OpenGL, Suggested simulations would include;

An Abacus, an astrolabe and a slide ruler (1 project)

Antikythera Mechanism (1 project)

Jacquard Loom (1 project)

Schickard Clock (1 project)

Pascalina (1 project)

Curta Calculator (1 project)