I am a couple weeks into classes now, so hopefully I will have some time to work on some projects. One of the classes that I am taking in my last semester at CWRU is EECS 395: Senior Project. It is not a required class for me (since I had another class that counted as my capstone project), but I wanted to take it in order to get another large coding project under my belt. Although there are several of my fraternity brothers in the class, I am only going to be working with one of them. We made the decision to split based on the difference in our coding ability. My partner and I felt that we would be left behind by the other two if we were in a group with them and that we would learn less from the project.
We spent about a week brainstorming ideas. While we came up with a lot of them, we had some pretty stringent standards for ideas. We wanted our project to:
- Be marketable
- Be difficult
- Utilize a technology or language that neither of us had used
- Present an interesting design problem
- Either be a new solution to a problem or significantly improve on an existing solution (in other words, we do not want to make a clone of an application).
- Be doable in a semester
- Be in an area that both of us had interest in
- The last requirement is a little loose since by the end of our brainstorming session, we were just looking for something that we were both at least familiar with. We also brought in an alumnus brother of the chapter as a consultant for coming up with ideas. He was very helpful in discussing the scope and feasibility of ideas (since we want to have a working project done at the end of the semester).
Here are some of the ideas that we came up with:
- Grocery List
- IT Ticket Tracker
- Native Mobile app for RT
- IT Asset Tracker
- Survey Application for use with Tablets
- GitHub Android/iOS application
- Git/Hg/SVN Repository Browser
- UML Modeler
- Forum
- Virtual Card Game player
- Virtual Table Top Software
The idea we ultimately went with was a mixture of the Virtual Table Top and the Virtual Card Game player. I will detail it in another post.