Project Guidance

Navigating substantial projects: staying oriented, generating evidence, and writing as you build.

Choosing a Final-Year Project

The hardest part of a final-year project is often the part that happens before any code exists: picking one. Students who struggle here usually aren't short of ideas — they're short of a way to compare the ideas they…

Writing the Project Initiation Document

Once you've chosen a topic (see Choosing a Final-Year Project ), the next task is turning it into something a supervisor can approve, a marker can assess against, and — most usefully — something you can check your own…

Issue Tracking: CSGitLab and GitHub

The Project Initiation Document operates at the grain of objectives (O n ) and deliverables (D n ) — a handful of numbered items a marker can read in five minutes. Your actual week-to-week work happens at a much finer…

Process Over Product

A final-year project has an obvious product: working software, and a report describing it. It's natural to judge your own progress by that product alone — does it run, does it do the thing. But the product is not where…

Project Navigation & Triangulation

A project is not a linear march from A to B; it is an exploration of an unmapped space. Students most often get lost not because they lack ability, but because they stop checking where they are. The literature review…

Scaffolding, the ZPD, and Using GenAI Well

Two ideas from educational psychology explain why a good literature review — and a well-used AI assistant — accelerate a project instead of hollowing it out, while a badly-used one does the opposite. Both hinge on the…

The Report as the Front-End

This page assumes a project already has a defined aim and objectives. If you haven't chosen a topic yet, or written those down formally, start with Choosing a Final-Year Project and Writing the Project Initiation…