Competitions || Prizes || The Latest Technology || Example projects

The Leicester Experience

Here you can learn a little more about the activities of our students, including competitions and programming. Of course, there is far more to our degrees than illustrated here, but we hope to give you a flavour of some chosen highlights which you will experience at Leicester.

Competitions

Each year we hold a competition amongst our first year students. In previous years these were sponsored by O'Reilly, and are currently sponsored by Bloomberg. Normally we ask our students to write a computer player for a game. Previous games included a "tetris-like" game, Five in a Row and Awale. We hold a tournament to establish the winner. You may like to see an example: we asked our students to write a solution to the 5-in-a-row game. The game is played on a 19x19 board.

• There is one player with white stones and one with black.
• Each player places one of their stones on the board, alternating with the other player.
• Stones can only be placed on empty squares.
• Once a stone is placed it can never be moved or removed.
• The aim is to place five stones of your own colour in a straight line, vertically, horizontally or diagonally. The first player who achieves this, wins.

View 5 in a Row. You will see that it is possible to select the solutions written by the best three students, by clicking on the links found under the "black to play" and "white to play" icons.

Prizes may be offered for good solutions, and we hope that you will want to take up the challenges of our competitions if you choose to study with us. Employers are very keen indeed to employ graduates who have distinguished themselves. Winning a competition will add greatly to your CV when you leave us. However, even writing a very good solution, and being able to discuss this with your potential employers will increase your chances of securing a good job offer.

You can also view Hex . Both players try to connect their sides of the board. The first person who achieves this wins.

Prizes

As well as prize competitions, to inspire and encourage our students we also offer academic prize awards during each year of study.

In addition to the prizes funded by the University, the British Computer Society funds an award for the most promising first year student, and Microsoft Research supports prizes for the best overall graduate, and the best final year project. Microsoft also provides software and books for the best second year project team.

ATX Technologies Limited sponsors prizes for students on Computing and Management: prizes are awarded every year for the best students of every year of the degree.

The Latest Technology

Throughout the degree our students meet with state-of-the-art technology, both hardware and software.

Regarding software, as part of a second year module on Multimedia we teach Scalar Vector Graphics (SVG). SVG became recently a world wide web standard; you can see a simple example below. In order to view the following example, you might need to install an SVG plug-in for your browser. We would recommend the Adobe SVGviewer plug-in.

View the SVG example. You should see an animation which consists of the formation of an image of the flag of Australian from various two-dimensional components.

Regarding hardware, we will shortly have a new experimental laboratory dedicated to systems and networks. Students will be able to build small distributed systems, test routers, maintain wireless/wired networks and so on. The laboratory will have an RFID system which includes various sized tags, field generators and different size scanners; it will form an integral part of a second year module on Networks. When the lab is ready, we will put up some pictures.

Examples of Programming and Projects

Here is a small collection of programming examples, typically from the first and second years of the degree. Some of this is work to be undertaken by students and some consists of our demonstrations which support the work that students will do. Note that a lot of this is "at the coal-face" programming; much of the very advanced graphics which one sees these days is based upon the efforts of teams of programmers and extensive use of libraries.

There is also a list of titles for the substantial final year projects. This gives an indication of the considerable increase in the scope of what our students can understand and achieve over their time here at Leicester, from first year to third year.

• An example worksheet for introducing image processing.
• A virtual environment using Java 3d. Note you need a Java3d runtime enviroment installed on your computer to see this applet. You can download Java3d from Sun Developer Network .
• Spirographics a simple demonstration of Java.
• The Tower of Hanoi puzzle in Java.
• Final Year Projects provides a list of third year project titles, together with descriptions of the work involved in each project. A project occupies a third of your entire year's work, and is an important but exciting and challenging part of your degree.

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