Sakshi Education: Project Based Learning

Project Based Learning

Acquiring Technical knowledge broadly falls in two categories. Theoretical based learning or project based learning. Project works play a crucial role in obtaining technical knowledge in any professional or technical courses. Project-based learning goes beyond generating student interest. Well-designed projects encourage higher-level thinking. Projects bring out challenging questions that cannot be answered by rote learning. Projects allow students to solve the problems, make decisions, investigate new ideas, and helps in preparing new documentation.

Technical platform:
Engineering is one broad course where students learn theoretical subjects till the Third year and take up MINI and MAJOR projects in the final year 2nd semester, of course 2nd year for M.Tech students and 3rd year for MCA students. Students nowadays are not paying much attention in doing projects, rather they are purchasing these projects from various outside institutions where each project costs around Rs 5,000- 10,000. And these students are provided with the PPTs and the executable code where exactly 85 % of the students lack in understanding these projects and they blindly present their viva where finally they gain nothing.
Many of them feel that submitting a project is a formality in the Educational institutions, but these six months (final semester) is really crucial period for acquiring practical knowledge from your experience.

How to find a project:
This is really a big question in the mind of every student. There are several routes to setting up a project. Refer to various reputed national and international conference papers, IEEE papers and ACM computing surveys, Journals which really help in understanding the latest updates of works done. Study and understand what was contributed in the papers, from where you can generate new ideas, develop your own new algorithms, or can enhance existing algorithms.

Basic steps in the project:
Main steps in the development of project work are

Problem definition
Requirement analysis
Design phase
Identify the model (algorithm)
Implementation of the algorithm
Identify the dataset
Experimental results
Analyze the results
Conclusions (our observations)

Several ways to proceed:
For Example, select a real time data set, study the behavior of the data set, apply an algorithm on the dataset Implement the algorithm using any language like C, C++, JAVA, DOTNET and so, generate the results, and analyse the results and make your observations from these results.

Compare your generated results with the existing algorithms and make your conclusions. Identify the advantages and disadvantages of your work. And the extensions works that can be done from your work. Else approach faculty who has a project in mind. Or otherwise, with some ideas of the kind of project work you might like to do.
Then you need to find someone (faculty or teachers) with research experience in your desired field to speak to about it and guide you further.

Broad Areas in computer science:
Projects can be done in many broad areas in computer science like...

Data mining
Data structures and Algorithms
Compiler construction
Natural language processing
Image processing
Network security l Computer Networks
operating systems l software Engineering,
sensor Networks l mobile computing

Workshops:
Students have to attend the various short term courses and the workshops which are taking place in various educational institutions, R&D cells, CDAC, which really helps them in updating with latest technical trends. You can refer to websites of IITs, IIITs, NITs and university where tremendous number of workshops are going to be conducted through out the year. Finally, Engineering is to be learnt, not to be taught.

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