Project ideas

The first step in your semester-long project will be generating a few ideas that you and other students can choose from.

Due

This part of the project is due on Monday, 1/29, at 23:59.

Collaboration

While projects will be completed in pairs, everyone must submit these initial project ideas individually.

Assignment

Come up with at least three ideas for the semester project. (See the project overview for guidelines.)

Write up each idea as one paragraph (3–5 sentences) that makes it clear what you would be trying to accomplish and how.

You should also come up with a short name for the project. This doesn’t need to be anything clever; just a short way to refer to it.

Here’s an example:

How often are smart home devices misused?
This project will try to quantify how often smart home devices (like voice assistants, cameras, TVs, etc.) are used without their owner’s permission. We will conduct a survey where we ask people if they’ve ever experienced unauthorized use, how it happened, and how it made them feel. We will also ask the respondents if they themselves ever used devices without the owner’s permissions, why they did this, and whether there were any consequences.

(If you’re curious about what the results of this project would be, you can read them here!)

Coming up with ideas can be tough! If you need help brainstorming or aren’t sure about something you’ve come up with, come by office hours.

What to turn in

Please submit your project ideas as a plain-text (.txt) file to Canvas.

After all the ideas are in, I will share them with the rest of the class, so that everyone can start thinking about what they want to work on and with whom.

Late policy

Late submissions of this project component will receive no credit.