Teaching students how to be Computer Scientists through student projects

Student project work is a vital educational component of a Computer Science degree. We have enjoyed supervising student computing projects in six different universities around the world. We attempt to distill these experiences into a “formula” for the timepressured academic supervisor. We discuss project themes of recent interest to computing students and various strategies for managing portfolios of student projects for the greatest benefit of both the students concerned and the supervisors. We expect many colleagues will share our views and will have had similar experiences but we note a surprising “silence” in the Computing Science Education literature.