I have just finished writing feedback and obtaining marks for my first year students’ presentations. These presentations follow 11 weeks during which students formed companies and worked together to come up with a ‘product’ which had to involve mathematics and code (this semester comes just after 11 weeks of learning Python and Sage). In this post I’ll briefly describe some of the great things that the students came up with.

I must say that I was blown away by the standard this year. Last year the students did exceptionally well but this year the standard was even higher, I am so grateful for the effort put in by more or less everyone.

Some of the great projects included:

  • A website that used a fitted utility function (obtained from questioning family, friends, flatmates) to rank parking lots in terms of price and distance from a given venue (the website was written in Django and the function fitted using Sage).

  • A commando training app, with an actual reservist marine who is a student of ours:

  • A story based game with an original storyline stemming from the zodiac. The presentation culminated in Geraint, Jason and I (who were the audience) retaliating to their Nerf gun attack with our (hidden under the desk) Nerf guns (we had a hunch that this group would ambush us…). The game mechanics itself was coded in pure Python and the UI was almost written in Django (that was the goal but they didn’t have the time to fully implement it).

  • A Django site that had a graphical timeline of mathematics (on click you had access to a quizz and info etc…). This was one I was particularly excited about as it’s a tool I would love to use.

  • An outreach/educational package based around cryptography. They coded a variety of cyphers in Python and also put together an excellent set of teaching resources with really well drawn characters etc… They even threw in my dog Auraya (the likeness of the drawing is pretty awesome :)):

  • I ask my students to find an original way of showcasing their code. I don’t actually know the right answer to that ‘challenge’. Most students showcase the website and/or app, some will talk me through some code but this year one group did something quite frankly awesome: code on cake. Here’s some of the code they wrote for their phone app (written with kivy):

  • One group built a fully functioning and hosted web app (after taking a look at Django they decided that Flask was the way to go for this particular tool). Their app takes in a natural number and classifies it against a number of categories, go ahead and try it right now: Categorising Numbers

  • One of the more fun presentations was for a poker simulation app that uses a prime number representation of a hand of poker to simulate all possible outcomes of a given state. This work remarkably fast and immediately spits out (with neat graphics of the cards) the probability of winning given the current cards. As well as an impressive app the students presented it very well and invited me to play a game of poker (I lost, their mark was not affected…):

    Here are a couple of screen shots of the app itself:

    Home screen:

    The input card screen:

I am missing out a bunch of great projects (including an impressive actual business that I will be delighted to talk about more when appropriate). I am very grateful to the efforts put in by all the students and wish them well during their exams.