Final Projects at Ruppin Software Engineering Workshop 2015

This is the second year that I’m running the Integrative Software Engineering Workshop at the Ruppin Academic Center

As such I had the privilege to mentor the teams and guide them as they build a software project from scratch. The purpose is to give the students a taste of how a real project is being developed in the real world and let them experience all the steps involved. From finding an idea and making analysis to implementing and delivery to the customer (me in this case). You may want to read about the projects from last year, you can find it here: https://tamirdresher.github.io/2014/06/23/integrative-software-engineering-workshop-projects/

This year, all the projects were very very good and it was fun seeing the teams grow and learning together. There was also a very nice variety of technologies and platforms.

Team 1 – Piano Hero

The idea here was to create an application that will help you learn to play the piano. The teams invented a file format that represents the song notes, the file was loaded into a desktop application which controlled a microcontroller via Bluetooth. The microcontroller was connected to leds that are sticked to the piano keyboard, and were lit based on the song that you were playing.

You can control the pitch of the song (thus controlling the difficulty of playing) and learn different songs by just following and pressing the keys that were lit by the leds.

This team had to learn to work with the microcontroller and write a C application that control it. They investigate different module that they attached to it such as the Bluetooth and to connect it to a PC that was running the server side that was running a WPF application that was also displaying the piano keys graphically.

Team 2 – MAJA Tours

It’s a common practice for people that search for a vacation to look for deals in different sites for some period before ordering the vacation they want. This is done manually in most of the cases and you need to return to the sites each time to search again.

This team created an application that allows you to enter the vacation you want and save the search for you. It then runs a query against the external vacation sources (like Expedia) and see if there are new results that answer what you looked for – price, recommendations, dates etc.

This team used ASP.NET MVC for their backend and a Universal Application for their client so they can easily run the application on Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1

Team 3 – Hairy, the educational game for algorithmic thinking

The vision of this team was that algorithmic thinking is something that is essential to everyone and it needs to be taught since you are young.

To help with that vision they created an educational game with Unity3D that lets children solve different mission that require using block that represent code elements such as loops, conditions, operators and operands.

The game is very appealing and looks similar to angry birds so it’s easy to get into it.

One of the options I gave the teams to get a bonus was to create a blog that will have details on their progress and the things they encounter, this team took the offer and created a very informative blog: http://logicblocksastudentpov.blogspot.co.il/

Team 4 – SAMY

If you like to shop online, you will love this project. The team created a social platform for online shopping. They allow you to enter the url of the item you ordered (from ebay or Ali Express at the moment) and then parse it to get the details from the external site. You can then enter your order tracking id and let the application monitor the order status. The system will see if the order status hasn’t changed for a long time and will notify you in this case or on any change in status that it sees. You can also publish what you bought on the site itself or on Facebook and see what others are buying, what are the comments on each item and also your purchase history.

The team used ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework with Code First approach. On the client side, they used bootstrap

Team 5 – EZTrip

People don’t go to travel like they used to a few years ago, the team believes that this is because of the price of attractions and difficulty to find an itinerary that is accustomed to your needs. So they created EZTrip, a system that lets you be your own travel guide. You can search for attractions, build an itinerary, share it with others and invite them or join to an already published trip.

The used ASP.NET WebForms and Entitiy Framework, they even created an azure account and published it there.

Team 6 – Smart Taxi

Smart Taxi creates a network of taxi drivers and passengers. With Smart Taxi you can publish a request for a taxi and the system will try to find other passengers that you can share the taxi with, the drivers can see the request and respond with a price. The price is then split between the passengers that shared the ride proportionally to the distance they were travelling.

The application was written for Windows Phone devices and is using SignalR to connect with the server and get notifications from it.

Like in the previous year, this semester began with a lot of doubts about whether the teams will really finish in time. I’m truly amazed by the wonderful projects all the teams made. And I’m really proud of the work they have done throughout the semester, they taught themselves how to work with the technologies they never saw before and learned how to solve problems by searching, investigating, and not giving up. Above all they worked as a team and learned from the mistakes they done in each iteration.

Great job guys (and girls)!!!