This website archives the teaching and learning of a Software Engineering course. It supports teaching and learning during the course of study (September 2006 to May 2007). After the course, it is an archive for reference and sharing.
I thank for your participation and hard work towards the MT356F Software Project Contest (2006/2007). The contest will be closed for assessment exercise on March 26, 2007.
The first part of the assessment is peer-review. You are invited to give votes to at most three projects that you consider them well-done.
Please fill in the form and press the submit button. I will start looking at the responses on March 29, 2007.
Most of you have started to think about what you will do for the project. Remember that each team needs to present the project proposal on October 17 or 18. To help you focus more on the idea and the creative process, rather than on the proposal writing, I have written up a template for your proposal presentation and write-up. The template outlines the main issues and key questions that you need to address when you present your project proposal. You are free to add more if you consider it appropriate.
Subject of Interest
Overview on Information Entity
First Level Categorization
Further Characterization
Information Presentation
For each type of the single pages, the category pages, the tag pages, and the front page, address the following two questions.
Present the UI wireframe for each type of pages.
For the front page presentation, think about how to give the big picture of the subject of interest.
Conclusions
It is really interesting to find a way out of information maze.
An abstract of what you need to do
This project is about the navigation design and information design for a particular subject that interests you. You select a particular subject, analyze the content requirements, and work out the information architecture. Finally, you do the navigation design to facilitate the user’s movement through the information architecture, and design the presentation of information to facilitate understanding.
Some details of what you need to do
First, think about a collection of homogeneous information entities (e.g. Hong Kong secondary schools, web hosting companies in Hong Kong). The collection may contain several hundreds to over one thousand entities. You know that such a large collection of information entities exists, but there is a lack of systems that facilitate easy movement through the information space. You want to make it easy to get an overall picture of the information space.
Second, think a way to do first level categorization of these information entities. For example, in the case of Hong Kong secondary schools, we can easily categorize them by districts.
Third, think about what you can do to further characterize these information entities. You can then tag each entity with a number of keywords (i.e. assign a number of text labels to describe the characteristics of each entity).
Fourth, work out a simple structure to represent these information entities in a uniform way.
Fifth, input the actual data into database based on what you have decided from previous steps.
Sixth, do the visual design, interface design, and navigation design for the information captured in the database.
Seventh, you might find a number of interesting facts out of the information space. Share these by make a clear presentation.
What do you need to submit?
I expect you to submit a project proposal in two months. I will then give you my thoughts on it. After that, you do the design and the implementation. Finally, you deploy your software product and make it accessible to all peer students for sharing, commenting, and voting.
You can do it.
I promise that all of you can complete the project. The possible differences among the students are the quality of the interface design and the values of the software product. I will suggest a content management system, a number of useful programs and scripts for you to do the project. I will also provide all the computing facilitates you may need such as a web server and database server.
It is a competition.
I make the software project a competition. I hope this will encourage your participation and motivate you in some way. At the end, the whole class and I will select a winner, a first-runner up and a second runner-up of the project based on a number of criteria. I will award these three projects with very attractive prizes.
Important Dates
* September 19-20: Study the project idea and the related software tools
* September 26-27: Form your project team and submit the team membership
* October 3-4: Discuss with your team member the project proposal
* October 10-11: Continue discussing the project proposal
* October 17-18: Present your project proposal during class
* October 24-25: Revise your project proposal and submit it
* November 1-2: Start work on design and implementation
* November 28-29: Review your project progress