Students pitch to Stuff
17 November 2016
A team of COMP314 students presented their Software Engineering project to news provider Stuff in Auckland last week.
Over the semester students worked on developing a recommendation engine which would provide Stuff News readers with articles they may be interested in. The students constructed and investigated a hypothesis based around recommendations, then went through a process of developing a proof-of-concept Android mobile application, in which they gathered data from users to prove or disprove this hypothesis. The project brief was very open, so there was enormous flexibility in what the students could explore with recommendations, making for a very interesting project. The two main aspects of the project involved creating a recommendation engine which provides recommendations which are useful to the user, as well as building a user interface which provides these recommendations in an engaging way.
Lauren Nasmith from the team says they all learnt a lot from the project and it made for an interesting assignment, different from the norm. "We all learned a great deal from this experience, from working collectively as a group to communicating effectively with a business, delivering a truly valuable product for them. The project gave us excellent insight into the software development process for a real business and providing something different from the deliberate structure of assignment work."