Bedfordshire win second place!

A team from the University of Bedfordshire won runners up for Mobile at Brains Eden in Cambridge last weekend. 5 Students from different courses and different years in the Computer science department took part in the 48 hour hackathon.

Image from @andra_ivanescu on twitter.

The event was one of the biggest hackathons I’ve been to, there was teams from all over the world there. Spain, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and even Canada. The team consisted of Sean McGee (me), Bogdan Predescu, Liam Griffiths, Robert McGreal and Mathew Kaye.

The theme this year was “Unequal” and the game we designed was a medieval themed tilt game where you had to attack a castle while keeping the island even as all enemies would slide off.

We all won tablets for coming runners up and the first prize was a team from the Netherlands who again won tablets. The game will hopefully be published on android, iOS and windows market place soon. We are happy where we placed and considering the time taken we made a very polished and complete game. The competition was extremely good, almost every game we tried was unique and generally visually stunning.

Link to the game

http://it-ca.net/CastleTilt/Webplayer.html

I think the game turned out very well, considering the hackathon was 48 hours & only that time for those who brought there own laptops! We was stuck in a very hot room, 1 monitor and on macintoshes prone to over heating and made life difficult for us. We had an amazing outcome and are really happy with second place! A team from the Netherlands came first, we played there game during the gallery showcase and was great fun!

UPDATE: I also create a similar blog post which got featured on Microsoft.com! For those who wanted more information on it.

Final year project/dissertation

I’ve successfully handed in my final year project/dissertation; I would have loved to read a blog about what is involved in creating an artefact/paper. I won’t be talking about the paper itself, more about the workload and how much time it takes.

I have 4 units each year, for us we only had 150/400% grades for the final year project (dissertation, viva, poster day and artefact itself). This meant that while I was doing the final year project I had exams and other assignments to be doing. Comparing to other universities that do the same course, it’s also sometimes 100% focus on 1 artefact in the final year. This makes it much more impressive for the portfolio as you have more time spent on it, but on the other hand there is a lot more pressure to pick the right topic.

That being said, even though it was less than half of the years mark, I would not under estimate the workload that is involved. I was very confident in the software and actually producing the artefact, but when it came to writing the dissertation I was basically on everyone else’s level.  My final paper was overall around 90 pages. It’s very daunting to think that you need to write that amount and keep good quality throughout the report. It’s not something you can do last minute. Generally when it came to assignments I did like to leave it late, but for this there is paper I had to make sure I was on schedule throughout the project. I was still working on it the day before it was due in, but only trivial. I’d say about 80% of people I knew where only starting the main thesis days/less than a week before it was due. I started months before but slowly started adding stuff as I went along. I would strongly recommend that you keep a personal blog post on your final year project. A few reasons for this:

•           It’s a perfect place to keep backups, access them wherever you are.
•           Good for informal notes and errors you encounter.
•           Easier to keep in contact with your supervisor, it’s an easy place to showcase your work.
•           Keeping a personal blog is fun in general; I’ve had a lot of success with my own with plenty of career opportunities out of it.

I personally had backups of my work on multiple cloud storage spaces, multiple hard drives and constant backups being made after every change in the project. I handed my final year project in last week.  

http://it-ca.net/blogsean/?page_id=1244

My final artefact can be found here, I may release my final year report too, depending on results.