Submitted by Rachel Gardner on Wed, 02/04/2025 - 15:22
Awards were presented at the end of term to those second-year students judged to have created the most outstanding Group Design Projects.
All our undergraduates complete these projects during their second year. Doing so gives them experience of working on a real software development project and dealing with professional clients. This year clients ranged widely from academics to industry (including Meta, Nvidia and Epic Games), and from a county council to Alder Hey Children's Hospital. (You can see short videos about all the projects on our YouTube channel here.)
Awards were given in three categories:
The Most Impressive Technical Achievement Award. Runners up were Team Golf for their project on 'Computing Physical Calculus', and Team Delta for their project on 'Checkpoint Alternatives'. But the winner was Team India for their project for client Meta on 'CUDA Support for ClangIR'. Congratulations to Advay, Aidan, James, Mate, and Yue.
The Most Impressive Professional Achievement Award. Runners up wereTeam Uniform for their project 'Zeitgeist Map' – which set out to to create a web-based world map that could visually display how popular different music trends are in certain countries – and Team Bravo for their project 'Atmospheric Metaverse'. The Winner was Team Golf for their project on 'Computing Physical Calculus' which set out to create a digital working replica of the old mechanical 'Differential Analyzer', historically used to solve calculus problems. Well done to Aaron, Andy, Hanzhang, Joseph, Sophie and Simon.
The Best Contribution to a Better Future Award. Runners up were Team Sierra for their project on 'Training Investigative Interviewers' for which they created an app to help investigators and legal professionals practise their interview question skills, and Team Hotel for their project on 'Conversational Patient History'. The winner was Team Quebec for their project with Alder Hey Children's Hospital on Speech Error Detection and Correction. Congratulations to Amogh, Alex, Billy, Harsh, Sam and Tabby.
Alder Hey Hospital set the challenge because "children with cleft palate often experience unique speech challenges that require consistent, targeted support." The Hospital has already created an app to encourage such children to practise their speech at home between speech therapy appointments. But it collaborated with the students on this project to develop it further and said the team developed several impressive features including accurate speech analysis and easy-to-understand animations that show children how to shape their mouths for better pronunciation.
