Computer Science with Web Development BSc (Hons)

Academic skills when studying away from your home country can differ due to cultural and language differences in teaching and assessment practices. This module is designed to support your transition in the use and practice of technical language and subject specific skills around assessments and teaching provision in your chosen subject. The overall aim of this module is to develop your abilities to read and study effectively for academic purposes; to develop your skills in analysing and using source material in seminars and academic writing and to develop your use and application of language and communications skills to a higher level.

The topics you will cover on the module include:

• Understanding assignment briefs and exam questions.
• Developing academic writing skills, including citation, paraphrasing, and summarising.
• Practising ‘critical reading’ and ‘critical writing’
• Planning and structuring academic assignments (e.g. essays, reports and presentations).
• Avoiding academic misconduct and gaining credit by using academic sources and referencing effectively.
• Listening skills for lectures.
• Speaking in seminar presentations.
• Presenting your ideas
• Giving discipline-related academic presentations, experiencing peer observation, and receiving formative feedback.
• Speed reading techniques.
• Developing self-reflection skills.

This module functions as a “capstone” to your Batchelor studies. The module gives you the opportunity to work in a team to build a computing product directly related to your programme of study. This develops and demonstrates your skills in leadership, team work, project management, planning, communication (both written and oral) as well as technical skills in the technology you choose to implement in. This module aims to give you further experience of team working in the specialism you have selected which is an invaluable asset and highly prized by employers. The project and its potential future commercial exploitation provide a context for you to critically evaluate your and your team’s performance, the fitness for purpose of the product you have developed and the legal, ethical, professional and social content of your chosen specialism. Appropriate Information Security factors will be considered as part of this evaluation. As part of this learning journey you will also explore the associated commercial and economic factors.

You will have the opportunity to apply a wide range of development skills (in specification, design and implementation) to your product development. All products will consider all aspects of the development life cycle. Some projects may be driven by research activity in the department’s research groups, some by the expectations of a “client” and some by students’ own interests. A “client” is a non-fictitious potential benefactor of the project for example a student’s employer, former placement provider, local charity etc. who are willing to formally consent to be involved in the project.

Wider Legal, Ethical, Social and Professional implications will be examined to enable you to appreciate the responsibilities involved in the development and use of computer products both in work and throughout society.

This module will introduce the key elements of business intelligence and organisational decision making. Drawing on business analytics, decision science and systems thinking, you will explore how organisations are able to leverage data and information to formulate a complete understanding of complex problems and to identify and implement optimal solutions. Employers are looking for data-literate graduates with the ability to explore and solve novel business problems, and as such, this module will cover topics such as organisational process modelling, business performance management, data analytics in a business context, and the use of data visualisation as a tool for exploration and communication. You will have to the opportunity to work with others in collaborative problem-solving scenarios, to investigate how businesses can use effective decision making to achieve optimal, sustainable solutions, and to explore the ethical, legal, and societal issues present when using data-driven technologies.

This module you will provide foundational knowledge of Cloud Computing whilst also exposing you to more complex cloud services used throughout industry. Cloud Computing allows organisations across all sectors to leverage innovation and business advantage through subscription services. Through the cloud businesses can access key technologies such as file storage, networking, virtual servers and software deployment tools. You will learn the theoretical concepts of Cloud Computing and develop practical skills for using a wide range of services commonly used within industry. The skills you acquire in this module will be applicable to digital roles in all sectors including learning how to scope out a cloud solution, understanding how to manage budgets and resources, learning how to create a virtual server to specific client requirements, and learning a range of programming skills for building and configuring cloud environments. You will also develop skills in critically interpreting current practice, for non-technical colleagues. That is, you will be able to explain the implications of adapting new technologies in relation to their cost benefits to your future colleagues or employees. The assessment will involve designing, constructing, and provisioning an appropriate Cloud Computing resource for a given scenario.

Through a number of guest lectures given by experts working in cloud delivery roles you will have an opportunity to gain insights into the kind of core cloud skills employers require. You will also critically engage with research outputs as part of your research rich learning. The assessment is made of 3 components 1) Practical demonstration of configuring cloud services for a given scenario (60%); 2) A written report (max 2000 words) which demonstrates a critical reflection of your cloud solution (40%).

This is your major final year project module where you will undertake a substantial individual practical computing project related to your programme of study. You will become knowledgeable in your chosen topic including important concepts and literature. You will use and further develop skills learnt elsewhere in your programme and acquire new skills and expertise to carry out the practical computing work. These could be technical skills such as a new programming language, experimental methods, and/or the use of statistical techniques to analyse your results. You will also acquire or further develop your professional skills including communication skills (both oral presentation and report writing), literature searching and review, research methods and design, project management and personal time management. Both the technical and professional skills developed through the project module will enhance your career and employability competencies.

You will have the freedom to choose a topic of your interest or select one provided by academic staff. Your project must include you undertaking practical work of some sort using computing/IT technology. This is most frequently achieved by the creation of an artefact as the focus for covering all or part of an implementation lifecycle. However, there are a diversity of approaches you can take. For example, you could choose to conduct a more product-focused project where the main deliverable is a product of some kind such as a piece of software, a game, a computer network, an information strategy. Or it could be a more investigative and/or research-focused project such as a digital forensics investigation, a comparison analysis of AI algorithms, a user experience investigation. Or your project could be a mix of both such as building a simulated network to investigate security vulnerabilities and mitigation schemes, creating a prototype to test the effectiveness of a digital technology. Projects based solely on literature review activity and/or user/market surveys are not acceptable. You could also work with an external enterprise client to create a product in terms of their business requirements.

This module will give you an essential foundation to focus on how to conduct statistical analysis and interpret various measures correctly. You will learn to think about the process of examining data from the “ground up”, adopting pragmatic approaches e.g., how to investigate and explore data, data structures and visualisations.

‘Data Analytics’ will prepare you for the study of the computational principles, methods, and systems for extracting and structuring knowledge from data. It will also prepare you for the application and use of those principles. For example, large data sets are now generated by almost every activity in science, society, and commerce - ranging from molecular biology to social media, from sustainable energy to health care. You will explore methods to conduct efficient and pragmatic approaches to ensure you have translational skills.

During ‘Data Analytics’ you will work through a series of exercises, making use of Northumbria’s state-of-the-art computer labs. Your learning will be research-rich by providing you opportunities to link with active research groups tackling real world problems to prepare you for life beyond Northumbria. The main element in assessment (100%) will be a final assignment that will bring together all your new skills and techniques.

This module is set in the context of today’s society and the organisations within. Social behaviour, often in the virtual environment, creates a range of ethical issues centering on information security and governance. In addition to exploring these social and ethical issues, legal and regulatory frameworks that have been developed in recent years to try to address these issues are examined. You will also learn about security in organisations and will be introduced to a range of common threats and countermeasures. Topics include basic definitions of terminology alongside practical and theoretical frameworks to help you identify key governance and security issues and explore potential preventative measures. You will be covering terms such as ‘governance’ and ‘security’, frameworks which include the information life cycle, regulations and guidelines relating to professional conduct, privacy and data protection,

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are a class of optimisation techniques that are inspired by natural evolution. They are well-suited to problems for which no specific solution method exists, or where other methods perform badly, and they have been used very successfully in areas as diverse as finance, engineering, architecture and logistics. In this module, you will learn about the fundamental principles of EAs, understand how (and why) they are used, and develop your own EA for a specific problem.

EAs are used extensively in business, industry, and scientific research, and the ability to analyse a problem and develop an EA to solve it demonstrates a number of sought-after key skills.

This module is research-driven, and is taught by academics who have published extensively in the field of evolutionary computation. You will benefit from access to up-to-date knowledge, codebases and datasets.

The main component of assessment is a development assignment (70%), which will bring together the skills and techniques that you will acquire during the course of the module.

Indicative list of topics:

• Natural and artificial evolution
• Representation schemes and search operators for optimisation
• Constrained and multi-objective optimisation
• Evaluation of evolutionary algorithm performance
• Theoretical foundations
• State-of-the-art applications

This module will give you a deep understanding of the implementation and programming of robot technologie as autonomous systems. You will have practical experience with using the math underlying robot programming and design, including kinematics, probability and geometry. You will be taught about the components, sensor arrays and programming frameworks that make up a modern robotic system. You will research and develop a small robot that is designed for a specific industrial application, for example a warehouse stock and material transport robot, a localisation and mapping robot or a driverless vehicle. Each implementation of a robotic system will use main control architecture, state of the art sensor fusion techniques that enable localisation, obstacle avoidance, vision algorithms, path planning or navigation. The module will also cover emergent ethical and safety issues related to robotics and automation.