Problems faced by students during their final year Projects
How important is Engineering final year project? Why bother making them when you can pay some money in the market and get all you want? Why do students end up buying projects?
Having interviewed several engineers I realized that students in India try to take shortcuts to final year Engineering project. During interviews one of the most important question for new grads is “What engineering projects did you work on?”
The idea as an interviewer is to find out what students understood and how much hands on experience they have. Unfortunately, most new grads from India have shallow knowledge. They end up buying their final year BTECH reports and engineering projects. What they don’t realize is that by doing this finding a job later will be hard. Even if they do find jobs they would have to struggle in their jobs. So, why not fix it right the first time around.
Most students I interviewed said their biggest problem was
1. Lack of guidance
Most colleges and professors have so many students that students do not get the required guidance.
2. Fear of unknown
Since these students have not built anything before how can they build something big in the final year?
3. Lack of research material
There is a lot of research they need to do to get the right project reports, where to find the ones which are fit for student use. Most relevant information especially circuit theory, technology and market trends is hard find.
4. Lack of time
Amidst, job search, extra curriculum, college fests, college coursework it’s hard to find so much time to dedicate on the final project.
Solutions:
1. Improve awareness of the educators by exposing them to industry, making them work in the industry or exposing them to industry technology through regular seminars. Wipro 10X is one such program.
2. Introducing small projects as a part of the curriculum of course work/practical, where one student works on building one product. Building projects provides more than just thrill of building. It helps with independent thinking, trouble shooting and gives exposure to end to end cycle. The governing education boards are mandating students to build not buy readymade projects.
3. Research material is hard to find. Several technical magazines can do the trick. Adormi Technologies has a research section in the CD with classroom theory, technology overview and market trends along with all hardware. Instructional videos included should also help students get both confidence and guidance required.
4. Many educational companies are now focused on software material that aid in supplementing the college knowledge. Training institutes give both soft-skills and hard-skill training. However these are more in software than hardware fields.
These efforts both by educator and industry should help improve quality of students by encouraging them to do more hands on.
This paper describes a computerized management system for the processing of a final year project in an electrical engineering undergraduate course including a structured project allocation to students, a comprehensive assessment procedure, an automated processing of marks, and a management supporting system. An optical reader is used to scan the project selection made by all the students, and the allocation algorithm allocates as many projects as possible in meeting the students' preferences. A new attempt using a grading category index for each assessment criterion is implemented and the assessment of the student's performance is evaluated through five main components with 31 assessment criteria. The marks for each student are scanned by an optical reader and calculated by a weighted linear conversion of all the grading category indexes. The assessment system is more valid as it has many specific criteria and is more reliable as the process is consistent. The management supporting tools and experiences in handling very large groups of students especially in the maintenance of a uniform marking standard to all the students are highlighted. It is hoped that some of our approaches can be selectively adopted for undergraduate course work on continuous assessment even for a smaller student population
Two months is an insanely short timescale for such an ambitious project. Remember that image recognition is pretty damn hard, and the fact that webcams deliver relatively poor image quality doesn't make it any easier.
Given the timescale, I recommend you do everything you can to save time (in a sensible way):
- Find libraries for everything non-specific. You don't want to code webcam image capturing yourself, you don't want to dig into low-level code to inject mouse movement events, and you certainly don't want to deal with pixel formats and image data management yourself. There are libraries for each of these; find them, and use them.
- Two months is way too short to accommodate learning a new programming language on top of finishing the project. Use a language in which you are all proficient.
- Forget cross-platform things, forget shiny GUIs, as you don't have time for these right now. Focus on the core mechanism - face recognition. Get the core functionality right, that is, a really simply UI (a blank window with one button maybe, or just a command-line program), save the UI for later.
So this way you can easily choose your project topics and can carry it on safely. For more engineering projects you may visit my blog.
Thank you
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