The site you are visiting is the result of a student group project undertaken in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Waikato , for the course COMPX241 Software Engineering Development which goes more affectionately by the name Smoke and Mirrors .
The Hey There project is just one example from a long running series of projects — going on for more than 20 years now — that challenge our 2nd year Software Engineering students in the BE program to take on, at first appearance, seemingly impossibly ambitious projects. Especially when the 6 week time-frame is taken into account!
The key to successful outcomes in these projects is in figuring out how to pick up existing libraries and APIs and learn quickly how to apply them to the task at hand. This skill is all too often overlooked in our Software Engineering and Computer Science degrees, where the focus is primarily on carefully controlled lab assignments where students are required to write code from scratch that implements a predetermined outcome. While this helps demonstrate how well students have understood what was taught in