Research project ideas for Computer Science students

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Sometimes Computer Science students struggle to find a final year research topic. In this post, you will find some ideas that can help you define a topic you can develop for your final year research project.

Once you choose your project, it is time to write your research proposal. I’ll leave some links at the end of this post that will guide you on how to do it.

Table of Contents

1. Mobile App for class notes

This app won’t be just another note-taking app. In this case, you can build it with specific requirements to facilitate the students learning process.

Some of the requirements can be:

  • Instructors can load a course to the app. This will include the course outline and notes.
  • Students can subscribe to a certain course. Then, they will have access to all the information uploaded by the instructor.
  • Students can take their own notes and decide whether to share them or not.
  • The notes should be easily discovered and grouped by topic and/or unit.

Main advantage: Students will be able to use the accumulated experience (by instructors and other students) in a certain subject.

2. Graphic simulator of programming structures and basic algorithms.

This topic will result in a progressive web application that can show, graphically, what exactly is happening while the computer executes the following:

  • Conditionals
  • Loops
  • Basic algorithms: counting, summing, maximum
  • Call to methods

It is well accepted that graphic representations help students to learn better. Also, there is one skill that is especially difficult for students named tracing.

Tracing is about finding out what will be the output of a given code. Understanding how the basic algorithms and programming structures work graphically will help students to grasp this skill.

3. Augmented Reality App to support the learning of OOP concepts.

This will be a cool app the students will just love.

The requirements will be the following:

– Once you point the camera to an object in the real world, the app first should identify the object.

– The app will give options to show attributes of the object (color, size, etc.)

– Show available actions to the object.

– Be able to execute some of the actions.

– Show a UML class diagram for the class, showing attributes and methods.

4. Augmented Reality App to translate UML to a code

The requirements will be as follows:

– Point the camera to a UML diagram.

– Show options for different programming languages.

– Show the code of the class in a specific programming language.

– Output the code to a file.

– Give options to save the file: upload to an FTP server, save locally, upload to a git repository, cloud integration, etc.

5. Moodle reports dashboard

Moodle is a well-known Learning Management System (LMS). It includes a list of useful reports, although some of them do not have the best presentation design.

This application can be developed as Moodle plugin. In this link, you can find a tutorial on how to develop a plugin for Moodle.

Some requirements that can be implemented are the following:

– Dashboard with user-defined Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

– Choose what type of graphs to show on the dashboard.

– Options to show any of the reports that Moodle already provides integrated on the dashboard. See the picture below.

– Options to track the performance of students with average marks within a certain range. This can help the lecturer to give special attention to students with difficulties.

– Additional reports of interest. To define which reports, the researcher should conduct interviews/questionnaires with lecturers and HoDs to find out what type of report will be useful for each of them. From these artefacts, the researcher will gain insights on how to better build the dashboard and include initial KPIs.

And that’s all for now.

I’ll keep updating this list regularly. So, if these ones don’t fit your preferences, come back again in a while. You are most welcome to leave a comment below.

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