Nigerian students at tertiary institutions often face the dilemma of choosing a project topic for their final year project thesis. Computer Science is a vast field that have touched virtually every aspect of our life, hence there are more than enough problems waiting to be solved by computer science students. In this post I will tell you about ways you can follow to choose your nice project topic.
It’s obvious to everyone in the Computer Science departments of Nigerian tertiary institutions that final year topic or problem to be solved were mostly taken and solved, which leave the coming students with few choices. However, that’s not really true as there are numerous problems which can be solved which students are not well aware of. Computer Science students have two options when it comes to final year project, which are
- Improve on existing project works already done by other students
- Create entirely different project (i.e. new idea)
The first one is quite simple as it doesn’t involve much critical thinking, all a student has to do is to find a project that is done by other students, examine it and find out its limitations and create your project upon that with the new features implemented. For instance, take a hospital system for example, which to my belief is among the most projects being done by final year students, if you take the project and examine it you will see a lot of features that were left out by the first student, you can create your project to implement some or all of the features you found not be included in the project. All you have to do is explain to your supervisor that you are not plagiarizing other works but rather you improving the work.
Finding new idea to implement for your project involve critical thinking; to find a problem that is worth solving and which has not been solved before. Your new project topic must be beneficial to some part of society. To find a topic for your new project, you should start by looking at your immediate environment to see if there is a problem that can be solved by computers, take for example that store owner near your home, what are his problems? He may tell you product/stock management or listing out products to buy before going to the market, that’s your statement of problem, you will create your project around it. Another instance is you have to look at people/society find something that people do, and look for a way that you can automate it, let’s say that you find out that there is some local raw material in your area that attract buyers from near and far, you can ease the process by creating a system that allow people to order the local material found in your area, you can act as the site administrator which is essentially a middleman, you can explain to your supervisor that the idea might even be an opportunity for you to earn your living.
Final Year project is not an easy task, hence the reason some people pay other professionals to do it for them and then teach them, which is inappropriate. Whatever way you choose to conduct your final year project, either improving already made projects or finding a new idea and building something on it, you must make sure that your work is impressive and also productive, you shouldn’t create a project that add more complexity to a problem just for the idea of automating it.