Computer Science Project Ideas

The following is a list of project "areas", with some suggestions:

• Ecommerce/Website Projects. Our experience shows that students love team projects that result in an interactive website. They both want to understand how to build interactive websites, leveraging their programming knowledge, and love to exercise their creative talents. Accordingly, we suggest a team-project:
  • Divide students into teams of, say 4 to 6 students each. Each team is required to build a website, complete with a business model, customer service, product display, checkout and purchase. Let the students go wild with their ideas, but insist that they demonstrate use of programming skills.
  • For teacher resources, you can start by browsing through our Ecommerce course and look through the on-line materials, the way the class was structured, and so on.
  • A complete set of teaching materials for an Ecommerce course is available for your use, including Powerpoint lecture slides.
  • How does Java figure into all of this? Students will build webpages using HTML (this is easy to learn, if they haven't already) and write server-side Java programs. Read through this Ecommerce technology introduction lecture to get an overview. Students will write Java servlets to handle web queries and input.
  • What about running webservers? Fortunately, there's no need for a separate machine that runs a webserver (this is a complicated setup that requires installation expertise with a webserver like Apache). Instead, a student can run a webserver on the SAME machine they use for running Java programs. The webserver is just another Java program - the web browser on the same machine can be used to demonstrate projects. We recommend using the free Jetty Webserver, itself written in Java and easy to install. Jetty can run both Java Servlets and Java Server Pages (JSP).
  • Do you need to install a database? Not at all. Databases add an unnecessary level of complexity because students will need to know SQL (a database language) and JDBC (a Java interface to SQL). Instead, ask students to simply store data in files. For the kinds of projects they're likely to work on, files are plenty useful.
  • If you give advanced students (typically at the end of a two course programming sequence) 3-5 months to work in teams on website projects, the results can be quite appealing.
  • It's important to note that Java is not the only language that students can use for websites. PHP is a popular language for websites - the advantage is that it can be written directly inside HTML webpages and is fairly easy to learn.
• Interactive Applet Competition. Again, group students into teams and have them develop applet-based websites (consisting of HTML mixed with their applets). The students can compete in various categories (most creative, most humorous, most whatever).
• Group games. This type of project is a little more ambitious and requires some preparation and programming by the teacher. The idea is, each student will write a strategy in Java for a game. Then all the student programs will be placed on a single machine and the programs will compete to "win" (tournament style, or all-against-all style). One of the most famous such games is also an easy game to write strategies for: the Prisoner's Dilemma. See this site or this site for an overview and ideas.
• Cryptography. Cryptography is a great project theme for two reasons. First, a lot of early history of computing is tied to cryptography - see the Bletchley Park story. This lets you, the teacher, cover interesting historical material that's also exciting in its relationship to World War II. Second, the encryption/decryption/cryptanalysis projects can be fun. A good place to start are these two books: The Code Book (by Simon Singh) and Cryptology (by A.Beutelspacher). This is also a good opportunity to cover some of the mathematical details.
• Tie a project to other classes:
  • Mathematics. There are scores of mathematics projects ranging from simple graphical ones (graphing functions, 2D functions) to number-theoretic searches, to cryptography (see above).
  • Physics. Simulations of physical phenomena, such as bouncing balls or particle collisions. See this excellent resource on physics simulation with Java for examples.
  • Chemistry. Students can draw molecules using the Java3D library. Another possibility is to simulate chemical reactions. the Edinformatics.com chemistry section for examples. The Edininformatics site has plenty of useful links.
  • Biology. The intersection of biology (molecular biology) and computer science is itself a huge and fast-growing field called bioinformatics. (To learn more about bioinformatics, see this page on bioinformatics we have created for teachers). However, there are also lots of biology applets listed here and here.
  • Economics. Many interesting applications of simulation can be found in Economics. See these links at Stanford University.