You are invited to ....

The Software Engineering Group Project Showcase 2011!

Details at: SE Showcase 2011

Hi everyone,

Abstract:

Now the truly longer version for those who appreciate stories ….

We all know those reality programmes that take contestants through some truly painful myriad of challenges, all for our entertainment (and the possibility of a few bucks for the winner).

Some of us love those shows. I mean who, from the comfort of their couch with an open bag of chips, doesn’t like seeing someone else being flung at high speed off a wildly spinning/rotating gyrosphere) on to some concrete with light padding. All stages of this single occurrence produce so many varied emotions in you, the audience: the anticipation (before the contestant goes flying), the flight itself, boom! the moment of impact, the few seconds of nothingness and nervous laughter amongst the audience, and then the final emotional stage when the contestant (grazed knees, broken bones and all) stands up in blazing glory whilst rubbing off their own vomit, raises both hands in the air as if to declare some marvellous (yet, fictitious) victory. Woohoo! What a rollercoaster ride both for the crowd and your bag of chips, which is now mostly all over the floor. And guess what? That was just stage 1 of the contest!

But there are others of us who don’t like those shows. However, we are still curious and ask:

“What is the point of that? Seriously, how demented/psychologically-unstable does one have to be to know the final painful predicament and yet opt to do it? Why?"

We (the teaching team at COSC325) belong to both camps of people above. Some of us just love the sheer entertainment value of this behaviour. Others love to ask “why” – in the research sense of course.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t get ethics approval to have COSC325 as such a show. So instead, we took a similar but “mental” (in all senses of the word) route.

Here’s the basic idea: We divide the class into teams (about 6 people in each), give them a project task that, on initially hearing it, auto-moves their bowel contents out of their bodies and undergarments. We then give them a year to figure out how to design, negotiate, allocate tasks and resources, implement, and test their product with the customer’s requirements. Remember, we still want it to be as close to the reality show as possible. So during this time, customers were staunch, demanding, vague, “wanting everything for nothing”, threw in “surprises” along the way, disagreed with the other customer, and of course changed their minds often. This part was easy, as that comes naturally to us academics. The students also were regularly scrutinised and assessed (their work, not their mental health). This year, we even had mother nature’s help to really shake them up.

That was for a whole year (ha! Beat that reality shows!). Now that we are at the end of the year, we are going to have the annual Software Engineering Showcase (SE-Showcase 2011!) where each group will get to market their product in 10 minutes to you. They are even meant to run demos (live interactive demos! Need I say more?).

If you are a 200-level student, then this is pretty much a must to see. For the rest of the COSC family, we are very proud of this bunch of students (especially working through the earthquake disruptions) – please come and support them. This is very much a celebration of their huge efforts. Morning tea will be provided.

The demos are interactive; you’ll need an Android phone preferably to participate or a laptop. These are not essential, but make it more interesting. Please keep an eye on the SE-Showcase webpage for more details (it changes hourly).

And did I mention, morning tea will be provided?

See you all there,
Moffat

Now back to the SE Showcase 2011 page...

If you have any queries regarding this, please email Moffat Mathews