Upper Years Make an Exhibition of Themselves

The Media Technology Programme filled the University’s Spark Atrium today for their annual Project Exhibition. The event is the culmination of three years of study for the final year students, where they present the outcome from their major projects in the form of a poster exhibition. The third years were also joined by second year students exhibiting group-based projects from their Managing Projects unit.

The final year project is a major part of the students’ degrees as they undertake a self-managed project of significant scale. It’s important in terms of the amount of academic credit associated with it but is also an opportunity for the students to specialise in a narrow field of their choosing. Most projects produce some kind of artefact that addresses a technical challenge or problem that is related to the student’s degree pathway. This may take the form of a piece of hardware or software or the practical implementation of a new technique or dataset. The projects are supervised by an academic but the students manage the entire lifecycle including research, design, implementation and testing as well as the project management and supporting documentation. The students write this up in the form of a dissertation and summarise their work on an A1 academic poster for the exhibition.

Needless to say the students always surprise us with the diversity of the challenges that they come up with and the exhibition was packed with gadgets and gizmos related to audio, acoustics, vision and computing fields. Topics ranged from ‘Diagnosis of Fractures using Acoustic Transmission Techniques’ to ‘Designing an Immersive Audio System for Escape Rooms’ and ‘Applications of a Raspberry Pi Thermal Camera’.

The Media Technology programme is lucky to receive immense support from the industry and the exhibition was extremely well attended by representatives from across the media and acoustics sectors. It’s great to see the enthusiasm and knowledge that the students demonstrate when they talk to visitors and several received offers of interviews or even jobs during the day. The exhibition is a great opportunity for the students to network with engineers and managers from a variety of organisations.

The success of the exhibition has meant it has also started to serve as a bit of a networking opportunity for our visitors. The course team were able to meet with a number of industry contacts to exchange ideas and discuss future collaborations and it’s always great to catch up with former staff and graduates from the last 25 years.

Well done to all the students that exhibited. The day serves as an excellent celebration at the end of three years of sustained effort. The day really highlights how much they have achieved during their time at Solent - we’ll see them in July for their graduation and wish them the best of luck in their professional careers or further studies.

We’ll see the second years next year and hope you’ve been inspired for your own final major projects.