CSE403 Sample Project Ideas
If you already have a project idea in mind -- something you've been wanting to design and build for
someone -- then we encourage you to try that. Motivation is the number one factor for success in
almost any domain, so if you are motivated about doing something, go for it!
Alternatively, if you'd like to start brainstorming by looking at sample project ideas (that were
proposed and in some cases developed by students like you), then look below.
Note: When you are deciding how big or how small your project needs to be, consider this:
it must be able to accommodate at least 6 students for a full quarter, so aim higher than on other
class projects you have had in CSE.
Project brainstorming
Need a bit of inspiration?
Group projects done at UW-CSE
Group projects done elsewhere
More sample ideas for group projects
- Design and develop and web-based system for vacation home shared purchases. An initial set of necessary features include: (a) managing a DB with images and descriptions of available vacation homes / estates; (b) providing mechanisms for potential buyers (who may generally live worlds apart from each other) to communicate and negotiate with each other while preserving some anonymity; (c) providing a mechanism for home sellers to enter their data in the system and negotiate effectively with potential buyers given that they may never meet each other in person.
Note: If the idea of vacation home purchases doesn't excite you, the same general framework could be reused in different contexts, e.g., online collaboration/negotiation, agent-based decision making, volunteer matching and event coordination, online date match finding, etc.
- Design and develop a middleware that all universities and colleges could use in their undergraduate and graduate admissions processes. If you've ever had to fill out 10 different very similar yet disjoint college applications, you'll know that there is much redundant work that could easily be eliminated using available technology. Moreover, universities could then outsource this work they're currently doing themselves (which has much overlap with others but no sharing whatsoever).
With your system, students would have a single place to go to and upload (most of) their application documents. Of course, universities need to have a mechanism to obtain those securely. The system must make every effort to preserve the confidentiality and integrity of data -- no applicant must have access to data that is not his/her own, and no university must have access to data that was part of the application materials of a student to some other university.
Extensibility would be key to this system, since we want new universities to be able to join in later and define what types of documents they require (including some of the common ones and some specific to the requesting university). The user interfaces would also be partly defined by the individual universities, depending on the types of questions they want to ask their applicants.
- Design and develop a name management system (perhaps one that can be plugged into applications that need to manage names) that accommodates a wide range of people's names, including transliterations in other languages and graphical ways of "spelling" names (at the time of entry as well as for searching). Example names the system needs to handle include: Dr. Johann D. Brown Jr., PE; Bill O'Reilly; Edwin van der Sar; Frank O; Madonna; III; The Artist Formerly Known as Prince; etc.
- Extend a popular open source text editing application of your choice to allow annotation of documents and writing of reviews as part of the document (similarly to how MS Word's review feature works).
- Extend a popular open source email client (e.g., Unix pine) to allow annotation of emails by the recipient.