Ural student bikes
What do students who like to program do?
Someone goes to all lectures and practices, does laboratory work, but the tasks for them are often too toy. Someone gets a job already at junior courses, but then there is no time left for the brainwashing at the university, and the tasks that need to be solved are not always interesting. Someone goes into “sports programming,” participates in ACM, TopCoder, Mircrosoft ImagineCup, and Internet maths competitions from Yandex. Well, someone starts to poke around in their own technologies, trying to implement their own ideas and create their own project. The university also provides an opportunity to listen to the advice of teachers and more experienced comrades, to gather a group of like-minded people. Are students able to independently invent and develop good and useful programs? Let's look at the finalists of the student project competition, which the SKB Kontur IT company organized in Yekaterinburg.
So what are the current students doing?
As expected, the students of the technical university of the USTU-UPI (now mutated in UrFU), told about engineering programs. The presented visualizer of physical fields painted beautiful pictures that are asked to report or graduate work. In terms of functionality, of course, the program is incomparable with the well-known and expensive FieldView , but the temperature distribution in the blast furnace is able to depict quite clearly. Another project allows you to design pipeline networks as well as calculate their physical characteristics (for example, hydraulic resistance coefficients). Everything is much more serious here - although the program was created almost alone, its running in at large enterprises is still very successful.
The field of web programming was represented by two implementations of fashionable ideas now: a graphic online editor that allows several users to simultaneously edit the same image, and a website designer, which allows you to quickly create a simple page from a set of ready-made elements.
System programming was not left inoperative either: in the genre of “Wine on the contrary,” they told about a program that runs ELF files under Windows, but the project is still at an early stage of development. Another student presented a set of utilities that solved the typical task of a system administrator - monitoring server performance. It's far from Nagios solutions, but utilities work fine under Windows and feel free to send SMS to admin when attacking the server.
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Of course, students could not ignore the development of computer games. A simple but nice puzzle game Crash Balls is already on sale in the AppStore and is actively advertised on the Internet .
Two projects represented the field of computer graphics. One of the students presented his own algorithm for fractal interpolation of images, which, unfortunately, is still essentially losing to the paid plug-in for Photoshop . Also, a three-dimensional graphics engine was demonstrated, implemented on the .NET platform, which already allows creating complex and beautiful scenes, working with both Direct3D and OpenGL, and easily modified to work with other APIs. The engine can be used at the university, for example, to visualize scientific results. So, the author has already found him to use in another submitted project - Warp Engine . Its developers want to use this gaming platform both for developing games in the FPS genre and for research in the field of artificial intelligence. On its basis in the Ural State University in the spring of 2010 there were held competitions in robotics .
The laboratory of artificial intelligence and robotics of Ural State University presented two more projects at the competition. RoboCoP (Robot Communication Protocol) provides the interaction of all applications created in the laboratory. It is implemented in C # and works so far only on top of TCP and UDP and under Windows, however, the students' plans are to port it to Linux and ensure work on COM and USB. Well, in the control system of mobile robots, both the task of selecting objects in an image from a webcam, and the task of moving a manipulator arm, which independently assembles a pyramid of small kegs, is solved.
As you can see, most projects really reinvent the wheel. For their authors, these projects are certainly simpler and clearer than existing analogues, but this is hardly true for all others. Of course, in the process of writing these programs, students can learn a lot. But is it really necessary to encourage such projects, distracting students from their studies and from work? Do you need such student contests?
Even if the answer to the last question is positive, how to understand which projects are the best? Of course, if a program is poorly tested, works unstable, or does not provide a tenth of the declared functionality, then its author can hardly be praised. Contour's developers, who evaluated projects at the competition, took into account their degree of readiness, but first of all encouraged the student's ability to find application for his project, be it use in industrial enterprises, universities, or other student projects. However, is not the originality of the idea underlying the project, or, say, the quality of its implementation, more valuable? Finally, if almost all student projects still never become widespread and will soon be abandoned, would it not be better to take into account in assessing the project the amount of knowledge and skills that the student acquired in working on it?
Someone goes to all lectures and practices, does laboratory work, but the tasks for them are often too toy. Someone gets a job already at junior courses, but then there is no time left for the brainwashing at the university, and the tasks that need to be solved are not always interesting. Someone goes into “sports programming,” participates in ACM, TopCoder, Mircrosoft ImagineCup, and Internet maths competitions from Yandex. Well, someone starts to poke around in their own technologies, trying to implement their own ideas and create their own project. The university also provides an opportunity to listen to the advice of teachers and more experienced comrades, to gather a group of like-minded people. Are students able to independently invent and develop good and useful programs? Let's look at the finalists of the student project competition, which the SKB Kontur IT company organized in Yekaterinburg.
So what are the current students doing?
As expected, the students of the technical university of the USTU-UPI (now mutated in UrFU), told about engineering programs. The presented visualizer of physical fields painted beautiful pictures that are asked to report or graduate work. In terms of functionality, of course, the program is incomparable with the well-known and expensive FieldView , but the temperature distribution in the blast furnace is able to depict quite clearly. Another project allows you to design pipeline networks as well as calculate their physical characteristics (for example, hydraulic resistance coefficients). Everything is much more serious here - although the program was created almost alone, its running in at large enterprises is still very successful.
The field of web programming was represented by two implementations of fashionable ideas now: a graphic online editor that allows several users to simultaneously edit the same image, and a website designer, which allows you to quickly create a simple page from a set of ready-made elements.
System programming was not left inoperative either: in the genre of “Wine on the contrary,” they told about a program that runs ELF files under Windows, but the project is still at an early stage of development. Another student presented a set of utilities that solved the typical task of a system administrator - monitoring server performance. It's far from Nagios solutions, but utilities work fine under Windows and feel free to send SMS to admin when attacking the server.
')
Of course, students could not ignore the development of computer games. A simple but nice puzzle game Crash Balls is already on sale in the AppStore and is actively advertised on the Internet .
Two projects represented the field of computer graphics. One of the students presented his own algorithm for fractal interpolation of images, which, unfortunately, is still essentially losing to the paid plug-in for Photoshop . Also, a three-dimensional graphics engine was demonstrated, implemented on the .NET platform, which already allows creating complex and beautiful scenes, working with both Direct3D and OpenGL, and easily modified to work with other APIs. The engine can be used at the university, for example, to visualize scientific results. So, the author has already found him to use in another submitted project - Warp Engine . Its developers want to use this gaming platform both for developing games in the FPS genre and for research in the field of artificial intelligence. On its basis in the Ural State University in the spring of 2010 there were held competitions in robotics .
The laboratory of artificial intelligence and robotics of Ural State University presented two more projects at the competition. RoboCoP (Robot Communication Protocol) provides the interaction of all applications created in the laboratory. It is implemented in C # and works so far only on top of TCP and UDP and under Windows, however, the students' plans are to port it to Linux and ensure work on COM and USB. Well, in the control system of mobile robots, both the task of selecting objects in an image from a webcam, and the task of moving a manipulator arm, which independently assembles a pyramid of small kegs, is solved.
As you can see, most projects really reinvent the wheel. For their authors, these projects are certainly simpler and clearer than existing analogues, but this is hardly true for all others. Of course, in the process of writing these programs, students can learn a lot. But is it really necessary to encourage such projects, distracting students from their studies and from work? Do you need such student contests?
Even if the answer to the last question is positive, how to understand which projects are the best? Of course, if a program is poorly tested, works unstable, or does not provide a tenth of the declared functionality, then its author can hardly be praised. Contour's developers, who evaluated projects at the competition, took into account their degree of readiness, but first of all encouraged the student's ability to find application for his project, be it use in industrial enterprises, universities, or other student projects. However, is not the originality of the idea underlying the project, or, say, the quality of its implementation, more valuable? Finally, if almost all student projects still never become widespread and will soon be abandoned, would it not be better to take into account in assessing the project the amount of knowledge and skills that the student acquired in working on it?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/99006/
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