An innovative new way of linking small businesses with Universities in the region has been launched by virtual worlds solution provider Daden Limited. The idea grew from Daden's regular contact with regional Universities, as Daden's MD David Burden explains:

"In meetings with Universities the topic would often turn to ideas for student projects. We'd always have our ideas when the students were already committed, and the Universities would always be searching for ideas just when we couldn't think of any".

As a result Daden has now set up a page on its web site dedicated to student projects ideas. Whenever Daden staff have an idea for a student project they can post it to the page, and whenever Universities are looking for ideas they can just check the page - or point students directly to it. Each project gives the project aim, a summary of the likely skills needed, pointers to related work or possible methods, and some idea of project duration. Initial projects on the site range from looking at how learning in virtual worlds is different to conventional eLearning, through making a computer program that is bad at maths, to creating a chatbot that can pass the human citizenship test!

David continues, "Whilst this page will help pass student project ideas into Universities, what we'd really like to see is lots of SMEs adopting the same approach. We've put an RSS feed on our page so that Universities could easily aggregate the projects from hundreds of companies. This will make it far easier for us, and we hope other SME's, to tap into the resources of the region's Universities. It will hopefully give the students meaningful projects with a real commercial focus. It might even be that the Academics already know the answers to the problems that we are setting - in which case we'd love to hear from them!"

The student project list has gained the local support of both Aston University and the University of Wolverhampton. Dr Stuart Slater of the University of Wolverhampton, who helped to contribute to the development of the idea, said

"There is a growing need for commercial organisations and Universities to talk about ways that enhance the educational experience and opportunities for students, and the competitiveness of UK industries, as such companies like Daden are a breath of fresh air.

By providing opportunities for students to develop real projects to meet commercial needs, the students get real world experience that will both improve their business and technical skills, but will also enhance their employability potential. This also has the effect that the bridge between UK industry and Universities strengthens and academics benefit from seeing and interacting through the student/company relationship, while knowledge transfer is nurtured. I hope that more UK companies take the example set by Daden to allow the UK economy to develop through its intellectual and commercial assets."

Dr David Evans, Computing Science Partnership Fellow, Aston University, who are the first University to point their students to the project list added

"This is the first opportunity that Aston's Computing Science group has had to collaborate with Daden. We have a specific Multi-Media Computing programme to which the projects proposed by Daden are particularly suited, and we are looking forward at supervising some of our students on these projects."

David concludes, "We're happy to host links to other SMEs student project pages form our site, and if the demand is there we could soon build an application to manage this consolidation so that Lecturers across the region could be actively prompted when new projects appear in their field, or just browse the whole project set at will - without the need to create a dedicated database or portal that needs separate management. Indeed we could even set that task as a student project!"