A Survey of Undergraduate Project Topics in Computer Science at the University of Botswana

Model curricula such as ACM/IEEE recommend that characteristics of students graduating in Computer Science should include project experience. In line with these recommendations, students in their fourth year of undergraduate study in the Computer Science department at the University of Botswana have to complete a major project as part of fulfilling the requirements for the award of a degree. The project gives students the opportunity to implement some of the theories and techniques learnt during the course of their programme of study. Students‘ choice of project topics therefore heavily depends on what the curriculum offers in terms of diversity of course content and techniques taught. This paper presents an analysis of 154 students’ projects in the Computer Science department at the University of Botswana for the period 2013–2016 with a particular focus on the topic trends and issues of diversity and relevance to both the local and international context. The topics’ list is categorized using the Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering method. The analysis of titles and abstracts shows an inclination towards web-based systems and mobile applications that are relevant to the local context. Also, the titles and abstracts do not reveal core Computer Science areas such as algorithms, machine learning and security. Trending topics in Computing, which are also typically done as project topics, also seem not to feature. To reveal an effective categorization and assess comparability to international trends the rest of entire project document (body) needs to be analysed.