Possible Project Ideas

Please feel encouraged to select a project from the list below, to propose a riff on one of these, or to propose your own idea.
Tags:
Categories:

  16 minute read  

This page is under construction, and undergoing frequent updates. Please check back soon for more ideas. If an idea has no “client” it doesn’t mean no one cares, it means it’s the default care-a-lot: Dr. Stewart.

1. Scanner/Gallery

Some parents/guardians have kids/charges/wards. In some of these contexts, those children may create a lot of art or other artifacts that demonstrate their recent schoolwork. What if there was a web app that kids could use on a tablet that:

  1. Made it super simple for them to take a picture of/scan their art/work
  2. evaporated it into a cloud
  3. autotagged with simple things (e.g. date/time)
  4. provided a view that cycled through the collection of art/work in and interesting way
  5. show recent things more often, and older things slightly less often
  6. assumes there are several displays near each other and shows things that go together or animates the transition of a photo from 1 display to the next
  7. could have a way to pause, skip, remove from the rotation, decrease the frequency, increase the frequency
  8. could have the ability to setup pre-planned themes 1. show things from approximately this date range in previous years around this time 1. show things on a certain topic/photos with certain content/objects 1. show photos that are tagged as “from” a particular kid or featuring that kid e.g. on their brithday, or while they’re viewing it

Stretch Topic

  • 3P APIs

Fun namestorming

  • Home 🍳 Skillet Stash Gallery
  • min-hoard
  • Hoarding 101
  • DigiHoard
  • Wezibit
  • Artifactory

2. Bin It!

game for learning html

  • binning text/content fragments into different html buckets like:
    • swipe left/right style?
    • or 4-8 home row bins?
    • or like loads a known page or screenshot of page and highlights a region and the learner presses the corresponding key on the keyboard to categorize how they might mark the item up. is it:
      • main
      • article
      • section
      • aside
      • nav
      • header
      • footer
      • h1-6
      • p
      • a
      • img
      • ul
      • ol
      • dl
      • li…

3. Xylophone library

  • users can create (and publish) xylophone designs (maybe some textual properties to describe, maybe a photo as well) it shoudl also know how many keys it has, what colors they are, whether/how they’re labeled, what approximate notes they are, maybe the app helps them identify the notes by listening through mic
  • the users can search (and crate/publish) songs that can be played if someone has a certain set of notes
  • once the app knows which notes they have and how they appear on the xylophone, the app can display the songs to learn/play in a way that matches the user’s own xylophone
  • the app can also help the user learn to play the songs by showing the notes/highlighting the keys on screen as they should be played and maybe even playing the notes for the user to mimic

Stretch Topic

4. Biniversary

You know how all these sheeple bow to the tyranny of the decimal system, and celebrate like 1-year anniversaries in their relationship or community or workplace or whatever, and then maybe it’s a big deal to hit 5, 10, 20 years? Yeah? Well, those years aren’t even special! How about I celebrate when I’ve been in a relationship for 1/16 OF.MY.LIFE?! 1/4? 1/2 (i.e. longer than I wasn’t)?

How about I give you a date (1st date? facebook status changed? tinder account hibernate? nvm that’s mono-normative I guess) and a reference point (date of birth), and you calculate the the future dates that correspond to different functions of time.

  • user can add future functions?
    • 1/2s
    • log?/exp?
    • else?
  • user can add dates of interest with corresponding reference dates
  • app calculates the future dates that correspond to the functions of time for those dates of interest/reference dates
  • app offers to add them to the google/outlook/thunderbird calendar

5. eldood

The “reverse” of a “doodle” (i.e. scheduling) poll. Rather than the initiator trying to find a time when the maximum number of respondents can attend all together, they wish to schedule the respondents in to mutually exclusive times in the initiator’s availability such that they are able to schedule the maximum number of respondents.

Examples

  • prof wants to schedule 1:1s with 90 students over the course of a few weeks.
  • fancy pants conference rooms has some feature that makes it much better for presenting/working/whatever. every group that would like to reserve the room responds to the poll with their availability and the application schedules them into the room such that the most groups get to use the room

Something something game theory and mixed/counter incentives

Maybe like when solutions are impossible certain respondents can be deprioritized (those with the fewest availabilities woudl sort of prevent the bad behavior of people only giving 1 time, but that would also pretty much eliminate the usefulness of this app, which can otherwise surface that fact that some folks are just legitimately more scheduled during the resource’s availability and perhaps by giving them the only time they can make, the system can schedule more people… else?)

6. multi-video transcription app

In qualitative data analysis in HCI research for example, sometimes video of participants in a research study will be used to support transcription (computers are helping majorly these days) and/or “coding” (tagging moments or time ranges of a video with a label, “annotating”). In many cases there may be several video sources that actually coincide in time (e.g. 3 camera angles on the group in the lab, and if each was using a laptop, 3 videos of their screens). It might be nice to have an app that could facilitate lining these up in time, and then playing/pausing, rewinding them all in sync, and would tie the transcription and coding to the times in the video.

7. crowd sourcing audio/video route walkthroughs

Have you seen google street view? Can we crowdsource it? What if you took a video of your walk to work, home, grocery store, between classes? Then someone who hasn’t been to the place could watch the video or travel the same route along with the video.

In particular, this might be interesting to people who are blind or visually impaired, especially if they have learned or are practicing with auditory object perception. They could use the app to learn a route before they go, or to experience a place they’ve never been.

8. milestone countdown

I’ll project this thing in my class, or at the club/concert, or some event. I’ll put in the itinerary and it will show some nice visualization/timeline that updates as the time passes/event progresses.

9. google calendar zipper

  • Google Calendars let me publish a feed of a calendar, but if I use several calendars to organize my events, and I want someone to be able to see my availability, they need to know about all the calendars. Let me sync in to your app and authorize you to work with my calendar, then you show me the list of calendars, I select which ones, and you re-publish a single calendar feed that aggregates all the selected calendars. (see how there’re different colors on this calendar? https://hcientist.com/contact/ )

10. app to (re)instantiate “plans” in our calendar

Say I’m going to travel to a conference, I need to do a predictable set/sequence of things, many relative to the date of departure/return. How about I add these tasks to a list/template in my account on your app, then when I tell you the start date or whatever parameters, and you copy those tasks onto my (e.g. google) calendar at the correct dates/times

Other Examples

  • cleaning up for visitors
  • going on vacation
  • preparing for career fair

11. make a gantt(?) chart from canvas assignments

…

12. Canvas prof hub

Prof auths to app with canvas credentials, can execute tasks that are not supported by canvas in its GUI.

13. fav character soundboard

  • users can add some character from whatever thing in their life (their wacky friend, that donkey from shrek, whatever)
  • to their character they can add sound files with a relatively short label
  • app displays huge buttons labeled with the provided labels above and when clicked it plays the associated sound file

14. Ethilogical

Continue past work on research in teaching CS+Ethics and the ACM code of ethics (Dr. Kirkpatrick + Dr. Stewart + students):

  • make an app in which students take on the role of app store reviewers presented with applications for admission/publication to the app store, and the student should approve or reject and should justify their decision in part with support from the ACM code of ethics.

15. Yo I’ll Solve It

  • user adds a set of resources
    • with user-defined properties
  • user adds a set of candidates
    • with user-defined properties
  • user specifies a range of how candidates can be assigned a single resource (1? 3? 2-4?)
  • app tries to assign resources to the candidates

Candidate property categories

This is adapted from groupeng

  1. Distribute: Spread candidates with this property across all candidate-resource assignemnts so that resource has about the same number of candidates with this property
  2. Aggregate: Assign candidates with some property to the same resource as each other
  3. Cluster: Ensure that candidates with some attribute are not isolated in a set of candidates assigned to a resource
  4. Balance: Ensure equal strength across sets-of-candidate-assigned-the-same-resource based on some numeric score (as a function of candidate properties)

Examples

I imagine this could be a general app that would actually solve:

  1. the “eldood” problem (also on this ideas page)
  2. Assigning employees (eg TAs) to shifts based on the need # of people per shift and the students availablity
  3. Assigning students in a course into project teams based on how they responded to a survey about their preferences, e.g.:
    • availability
      • Mondays 8-10am
      • Mondays 10am-12pm
      • Mondays 12pm-2pm
      • Mondays 2-4pm
      • …
    • top 5 project ideas
    • top 5 stretch topics
    • your goal for the project (C, B, A)
    • people you need to not work with
    • people you prefer to work with
    • working style (start early, start late)

Namestorming

  • “99probs”?
  • Problematic
  • Problematizer
  • Framer

16. cooking quest

  • start with the fewest staples and equipment (prescriptive), and the simplest techniques and recipes, then when ready like level up and buy just these few or those few ingredients or equipment and unlock this other set of recipes or go a different route

17. course planner

Help students who can’t make it in to meet with their advisor or who have, but now have collaborated with their advisor.

  • System helps student choose a template (starting CS 149 in Spring sem of sophomore)
  • student selects courses they intend to take and when (which semester) for all remaining semesters
  • system can give suggestions
    • courses maybe don’t take together
    • courses offered infrequently/irregularly (maybe don’t count on them in plan)
    • taking 261? have you considered joining UUG?

18. TSP Local Sights

add POIs in a city, get a (driving?) route informed by tsp … more soon… “The project involves recommending the shortest travel path for visitors to Harrisonburg. The webpage should enable visitors to select the sites they plan to visit, run the algorithm backend to find the shortest path, and display the path on Google Maps.”

Client(s) (other than Dr. Stewart)
Dr. Duan

Spotify

19. Spotify Party Mode

Show a visualizer, as well as current track metadata

20. Everything is a Remix

Select (with some humane UX) millisecond ranges of spotify tracks and play them together (one after the other)

Namestorming

  • smashify
  • spotimix (maybe taken)?
  • mixify?
  • spotismash?
  • spotimash?
  • reify (omg i love that!)

21. spotify discovery

find bands “adjacent” to my favorite bands, then find songs by those bands with >10K(?) plays … more soon…

22. Spotreon

  • have users auth with spotify
  • have them give you a credit card or paypal or something and pay you monthly (whatever they can afford)
  • as Jack Stratton says in the embedded video below, divide the money up among the artists they listen to.

23. SpotiTrack

  • have me auth with spotify and github
  • commit to github the playlists I follow.
  • with some frequency (daily?) check attempt to commit the change to those playlists to github (sometimes no change, that’s fine, no new commit)

24. JMU Coin Museum Web App

… more soon…

Client(s) (other than Dr. Stewart)
Dr. Forsyth

25. Who Dat?

Sort of flashcards/quizzing to help learn peoples names/face for profs, clubs, whatever.

I'd like something to help me both take attendance AND memorize students' names. It should allow me to upload a roster, photos, enter students' preferred names, their pronouns, tell me if multiple students have the same first name and subsequently display their last names too (so I don't say John and get three people respond), etc. I want to use it in-class so I have a better way of taking attendance than relying on paper or Canvas' attendance feature.

Outside of class, the app should also have the ability to show “flashcards” of either the student’s face or name and I need to select the matching face/name. This will help me memorize my students’ names.

Client(s) (other than Dr. Stewart)
Dr. I. Wang
Dr. Stewart
Dr. Johnson

26. Roanoke/Historical map thing

  • open app on mobile while i’m at a place
  • show a historical map of the place and my position as i walk around
Client (other than Dr. Stewart)
Nathan Self @ VT

27. ODE Viewer

https://wiki.cs.jmu.edu/department/research#ode_viewer … more soon…

Client(s) (other than Dr. Stewart)
Dr. Lam

28. recipe dependency graph visualization

parse recipes into steps and make a flow chart-like dependency tree for distributing tasks across multiple helpers etc. … more soon…

29. peer instruction

I would like a free and open source, easy-to-use tool for doing peer instruction. I want to write questions in Markdown and have students connect with a QR code and be able to do peer instruction in class without having to use Mentimeter, Slido, Runestone, or whatever. Ideally the tool would support the traditional workflow of students answering the same question twice, once before and after discussion with their peers.

IF-AT: web

https://www.cognalearn.com/ifat … more soon…

Client (other than Dr. Stewart)
Dr. Mayfield

Stretch Topic

  • Websockets (e.g. via Django Channels)
  • third-party auth (e.g. Canvas)

30. ThoughtSwap

Facilitators (e.g. teachers) pose a discussion prompt to participants (e.g. students), who respond anonymously. Facilitator optionally shows the collected responses (or “thoughts”) on a shared screen, and optionally “distributes” the “thoughts” such that participants end up with a different “thought” than they started with. Then in small groups, participants discuss the prompt from the position/“thought” they were assigned/distributed by the system.

Client(s) (other than Dr. Stewart)
Dr. Shrestha

References

  1. Gautam, Stewart, Shrestha, Tibau, Harrison, Tatar

Yes, but

Stretch Topic

  • Websockets (e.g. via Django Channels)

31. Cycleration

Dr. Bowers currently uses a bunch of things (including e.g. zwift and https://intervals.icu/ ) for his cycling. Much of the data that he gets right now is for post-hoc analysis, but he wants something that is more toward planning the ride in advance:

  • Input:
    • Rider’s biometrics of many kinds and past performance data
    • an intended route to bike
    • elevation along the route
    • division of the route into “segments”
    • intended power (wattage) for that segment
  • process: simulate the rider with the past performance data and biometrics and attempting the planned wattage
  • output:
  • extra: interface that is used during the ride to tell the cyclist that in the current segment/position, they’re supposed to be aiming for a particular wattage, maybe showing them whether they’re +/- the time estimate from the plan
Client (other than Dr. Stewart)
Dr. Bowers

32. Bike Transit Map

Dr. Bowers wants to be able to create a map of a community (e.g. Harrisonburg) that encodes vetted/safe/efficient bike routes. Then a visitor to the app, planning their ride would tell the thing the begin and end, and the app would try to keep them on the vetted routes as much as possible.

Client (other than Dr. Stewart)
Dr. Bowers

33. Office Hours Queue

  1. Profs can create accounts
  2. Students scan qr code or click link or whatever and are enqueued
  3. students can see their position in the q (like a restaurant table tracker thing)
  4. student gets Push notification when the person before them gets their turn

Facilitates students working in comfort while waiting for their turn in office hours

Section 1 Student Project Idea Submissions

S1A: Matt W.’s DigitalDipole - A General Chemistry Toolkit ⚛️⚗️

Possible Stretch Topics

  • React (to make code cleaner, especially for dynamic changing/‘generation’ of math markup)
  • WebGL (to render simple molecular geometries?)
  • threejs (‘interactive’ molecule renders)
  • 3rd party API’s with auth (AI chem meme generator would be one)

Description

A full-stack web app that aims to be a chemistry educational tool. It will have a “thick” client/frontend which we will write in React. It will also have a backend, which will be written in Python, using Django. It will feature calculators for various common chemistry problems, such as the myriad gas laws, limiting reagents & yields, solutions stoichiometry, thermochemistry & voltaic cells, and more.

While those may sound daunting, the math generally doesn’t extend beyond a calculus I level. In the majority of the cases, it is simple algebraic manipulation. No chemistry knowledge or background is necessarily required.

Name and domains

Regarding the name of the app, I own the domain digitaldipole.io, and several others I have been considering, like radicalvalence.com and canonicallychiral.io. If you have name ideas I am totally open to those too!!

This project has already been started, however the goal is to rewrite using React for the frontend, as some of the math markup (just tags for now) are a huge hassle to work with. There is no backend at the moment of course.

🎥 Demo Videos and Sample AI Meme Output (!?)

There are brief demo videos linked in the folder below. One clip shows the page for (ideal) gas law calculators and the dynamically updating math markup to respond to the user’s unknown quantity. Another shows an ‘Atom Carousel’ that tabulates an element’s data in a carousel of color coded (by group on periodic table) ‘atom cards’. You can jump-to specific atoms by inputting their atomic #, name in U.S. english, or atomic symbol.

It’s not all super serious though, as you’ll see there is an AI chemistry meme generator, and it requires 3rd party API w/ auth. An example meme is in the folder as well; that particular meme’s input was from the MadLibs version I started to write, and the string was; “Dad’s DeBroglie Wavelength aerosolized a beaker full of benzene during the heat death of the universe”.

Check out the videos and the sample meme output for a preview of what I hope to accomplish!

Section 2 Student Project Idea Submissions

S2B: Megan H.’s Spotify game/hub

I was interested in creating some sort of game using spotify’s api thats similar to beat shazam, where you name the artist and title of a song playing. I’m not sure how I was would implement this however- it’s just an idea right now. If this proves to be too complicated, I’d like to make some sort of social media for spotify where people can make posts about their listening and connect with friends.

Possible Stretch Topics

  • interacting with the spotify api

S2C: Hudson S.’s Web of Documents (WOD)

“When taking notes for any topic, keeping them in 1 document is unwieldy, and keeping them in multiple documents is often difficult to keep track of. WOD proposes the solution of many interlinked documents.

  • Txt files
  • Clickable links between different txt files
  • Viewable web of documents
  • Graph representation (points with variable number of edges)
  • Multiple “root” documents
  • Documents do not require connections to other documents
  • In-app tabs?
  • Embedding image?

If an example is needed to help visualize it. Look up Obsidian, its a desktop app that I’m hoping to recreate on the web.”

Possible Stretch Topics

  • React
  • File System API
Last modified March 17, 2024: fix typo (5b01aef)