Group Design Project

I’ve blogged a lot recently about everything that’s happened to me outside my degree (well, actually that’s not quite true, I’ve not really blogged a lot recently, oops) so I think it’s only fair that I take a look again at what goes on inside the hallowed walls of ECS.

This term I have been super-busy with the Masters Group Design Project, or GDP as it’s affectionately (?) known. The GDP is the hallmark of any ECS course and is a large real-life project tackled by groups of 4-5 students working on something tangible for an actual customer. This is really exciting as it means it’s something that’s actually going to be used out in the wild and not just another bit of coursework.

Unfortunately I can’t tell you too many specifics about what I’m doing as it’s protected by a non-disclosure agreement, but let’s just say we’re doing some pretty cool stuff with a Microsoft Kinect! It’s actually coming together surprisingly well too (touch wood) and with just over two weeks left to go we’ve nearly completed all the technical challenges we set out to do. It’s *just* the case of doing full and proper testing and writing up the remainder of the report left to go now. But at 24000 words long that’s a pretty major task in itself!

I’ve learned so much from the project – far more than I expected to in fact. It’s taught me a huge amount about team-work, project management, time-management as well as valuable new technical skills of course. Everyone in my group has had some form of summer placement too, so they’ve been able to share the various techniques they’ve used at their respective companies for managing things so we’ve all really learnt a lot from each other.

I’ve heard it said that one of the main reasons employers really like ECS graduates is because of the GDP – now I can finally see why.