| You can't build the next wheel without first getting a handle on how & why the existing wheels were built the way they were. Even CS undergrads start with toy operating systems that they fill in the parts for (adding a filesystem, writing a compiler for a toy language, etc). There's simply no better way to learn. > These students are obviously smarter than the average student, and therefore I would expect more of them, like inventing new OS concepts instead of mimicking age-old designs. You can disagree but here are the facts: 1. The students completed the task. 2. The professor had intentionally built slack into the schedule to let ambitious students take this further to play around with the tools & their knowledge to try doing creative things. 3. The students used this to recruit others students to form a larger team around a more ambitious end goal 4. Self-organized to distribute work & build a schedule that minimized interdependencies 5. Completed their goal. Aside from the technical stuff, these all sound like valuable soft skills that were learned/applied in addition to the technical achievement. I'd say both the professor & students did a good job here. What's hard for me to say is what year this is. In my old engineering school there was a final project in years 3 & 4. Your team would pick some kind of vague final project (with consultation from your teacher), you'd get a budget for materials + connections to companies/vendors for sponsorship, & then go about building your concept. That's a bit more complex than this but also lasts 1.5 years and happens largely outside of school. This blog post is about a project done within the context of 1 subject AFAICT. That makes it way more impressive. Students at this level simply don't yet (at least generally) have the experience nor a good understanding of the space to understand what are more significant problems to go tackle. From what I've seen you usually start that journey as a masters/PhD student. |
Jp uni students typically write a thesis in the fourth/final year (is it called senior in the US?). This project is for the third year (junior in the US?). Probably there is also a difference between a (e.g. mechanical) engineering and a CS department. A typical CS conference paper does not need 1.5 year from initiation to publication, while I understand a mech work will need a lot more time. I moved from B.Eng to CS. With a proper guidance that lets a student focus on a particular subject (a research theme is given by the advisor), they do incredible work, although they may not have a broader view of the research field yet.
> These students are obviously smarter than the average student,
And yes these national university students are the top brains of the country. BTW, I am very sad that typical Japanese corporate organization basically rejects them as they are too smart and do not fit in their age-based structure. The author is in Microsoft anyways.