Some Project Categories for LearningNet
Students in various software institutions will be getting closer to their last semester. Normally they are required to do some projects. I plan to add several of them to this site over the next few weeks. Here are some broad categories. If you are a student or an instructor, feel free to suggest additional categories. For each category I will list a set of projects. Based on interest, I will add more detailed description for each project.
I will be happy to guide any one on these projects virtually. What does “guide” mean? I can expand the description of the project, answer any questions and will be happy to look at the project and provide feedback.
The projects are divided into two broad categories - Technical and Non-technical. I will list the technical topics in this post. We will do the non-technical one in another.
Technical Categories
GUI Projects
Simple user interface widgets using HTML, CSS, AJAX and Simple Animations. Typically these projects are Javascript and HTML. They may use JSON or XML for access to common APIs from an open backend service.
Game Projects
Game projects are fun. Games can be written in C, Python, Java, Lua and other languages. We can develop a few Text Games or Simple Graphic Games or Animation based Games.
Firefox Extensions
It is possible to provide useful extensions to Firefox browser. Many of these enhance the browser in small incremental ways. In this category, we will try out several ideas for extending Firefox Browser.
Facebook Applications
Facebook is one of the fastest growing social applications. Facebook provides an API ( a programming interface) to build very powerful social applications. In this category, we will try different facebook projects.
Open Social Applications
Open Social, like Facebook is a way to build social applications across several social networks. These include Ning, MySpace, Orkut. In this category, we will try several projects using Google’s Open Social API.
Mobile Applications
There are several mobile operating systems. These inlcude Symbian (used by Nokia phones and several others) and Android - Google’s mobile operating system. In this category we will build mobile applications. These may include games, learning tools and other aids. These mobile applications can be built using Java (J2ME), Python (Nokia provides an API), or C.
Sofware Agents
Sotware agents are a powerful class of applications to perform a variety of automated tasks. These include spiders, bots, software extraction agents. Software agents can also be used for intertactive dialog (like Alicebot) and tutoring, coaching and entertainment. In this category, we will build several software agents and experiment with some useful ideas.
Database Projects
Most of the database projects I outlined so far in this blog are simple database applications. In this category we will cover two types of database projects - Database tools, Database Applications. While Database Applications are specific to a certain class of application, the tools are generic and can be used with any relational database. These include import/export utilities, database visualization tools, query builders and others.
Web 2.0 Applications
In this category we will build several social applications (without social networks) interlink existing Web 2.0 apps (like wikis and blogs) and build Web 2.0 widgets. There will be some overlap of these projects with AJAX, Mashups, Social Applications etc.
Semantic Web Applications
Projects in this category push the envelope and build the (possibly) next generation web applications. We use technologies like RDF, OWL and explore the semantic web space. Since this space is still being developed, this may be more experimental in nature.
Collaboration and Collective Intelligence Applications
This is an interesting class of applications where mulitple people can collaborate on buidling documents, learning content, mind maps, argument maps and several classes of applications for harvesting the collective intelligence of a large number of people.
We will add more to this list of categories. Let us know if we missed anything big. If you like this list, let us knwo which ones you want to participate in.
Mashups
Mashup projects are fun to write. They may vary from a few hours to a few days to build and leverage the growing number of publicly available APIs. A mashup is a way to combine, extend existing applications like Google maps, Google search and other powerful Web Applications in any language of your choice.
Animation Projects
In this category we will build simple animations. The goal would be to teach. So many of these may turn out to be simple simulations or learning tools. We may use Adobe Flash or Microsoft WPF to build these animations.
Artificial Intelligence
In this category we will build fun and useful projects. There are many interesting subject areas in AI. One of my next steps, is to collect various AI related efforts and put them in a separate blog post with links. Ideas for projects will come later.
Posted in projects on December 21st, 2008 by Dorai | |
