Undergraduates build real-world expertise with annual Group Design Practical

Computer Science undergraduates battled it out for prizes as they showcased their group design projects to industry representatives and peers at the annual department event.   

Group Design Practicals offer students the unique opportunity to work with industry and their fellow students to deliver real-world projects, taking forward the programming skills they have already acquired in their studies and offering a range of essential skills for future work and study. The practical projects, started in February, culminate in an exhibition and formal presentation. 

This year’s event included around 130 attendees, with students showcasing their demos to members of industry and other teams in the Robert Hooke Building, before presenting their projects in the impressive surroundings of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History.  

All undergraduates reading Computer Science, Computer Science & Philosophy or Mathematics & Computer Science take part in the projects in their second year. The programme is designed to give students the opportunity to apply the theory they have learned to real-world scenarios, in collaboration with key industry partners, while honing their abilities in team-working, project and time management, and presenting.  

The two winning groups, who each enjoyed £500 in prize money, were as follows: 

Team 12 for OxFolder. The team excelled with an interactive presentation, which included an impressive 3D graph visualisation of similarities among documents. Congratulations to Yang Gao, Jamie Honeywill, Lucas Colley, Alex Perry, Richard Yu (pictured left-right below) and Mehmet Koca. 

Team 16 for their Vision-Based Price Comparison Tool. The group was lauded for its excellent technical execution of the project, overcoming challenges such as data collection. Congratulations to Ronnith Nandy, Tejas Krishnan, Ean Seng Chang, Aleksa Dordevic, Dominic Peng, Igor Klimczak and Sebastian Potoniec (pictured left-right below).