UWTSD Applied Computing Blog

We are delighted to announce the ‘Group 1’ Winners of the Changemakers Innovation Competition 2026. This competition empowers our students to design and develop innovative, real-world solutions that create Positive Social Impact (PSI) while building essential technical, professional, and ethical skills.

About the Competition:

The Competition is part of a ‘Year 2 Computing Innovation module’ delivered across all our BSc Computing programmes with two separate cohorts of students:
* Group 1 (Semester 2): February – May
* Group 2 (Semester 3): May – July

Students progress through key stages of project development, transforming ideas into practical solutions that could be launched as new business ventures or implemented within large organisations.

Each group competes for Certificates of Achievement & Prizes across three categories:

• Best Social Impact Innovation Project 2026
• Best Development Innovation Project 2026 (including Game Development)
• Best Networking & Cyber Security Innovation Project 2026

In addition, our industry partners from Fujitsu select the top three overall projects in each group, with generous prize funding provided by the Engineers and Scientists in Business Fellowship (ESBF): Final prize placements will be announced at a special award event in September 2026.

🏆 Group 1 Winners Announced:

We are excited to announce the Group 1 category winners, selected by our industry partners from Fujitsu following an exceptionally high standard of submissions:

🌍 Social Impact Innovation Award: Daniel Leone
The Human Firewall: An Educational Cybersecurity-Themed Game. Recognised for an excellent, well-structured project using gamification to address a growing real-world cybersecurity challenge.

💻 Development Innovation Award: Olivia Rose Collins
WearWise AI (Wear the Weather). Awarded for a highly polished, fully functional solution with clear concept validation and strong technical implementation.

🔐 Networking & Cyber Security Innovation Award: Tonio George
CyberGuard Pro: Network Security Tool. Recognised for a robust network-level solution that identifies vulnerabilities directly and provides clear, evidence-based risk analysis.

🎉 Congratulations to all three winners – an excellent achievement!

Special Industry Award – ShipMax Ltd:

We are also pleased to announce the ShipMax Innovation Award, selected by Phil Rees (CEO, ShipMax Ltd) which goes:

🏅 Tonio George – CyberGuard Pro

This award includes:

• Amazon Voucher
• 1 week of industry work experience
• LinkedIn recommendation (subject to completion)

What Happens Next?

The final prize rankings (1st, 2nd, and 3rd place) for Group 1 will be revealed at our upcoming:

📍 Presentation & Movie Night
📅 Thursday 24th September 2026
📌 Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea

All students will be invited to attend and celebrate the fantastic work achieved across the module.

Exciting Opportunities for Winners:

All winning students will receive:

• ✅ Certificates of Achievement
• ✅ Prize money (awarded after the event)
• ✅ A day trip to Google HQ in London (Friday 4th September 2026)
  • Including a tour and industry talks

Recognising Excellence Across the Cohort:

The judging panel highlighted the exceptionally high quality of submissions, noting how challenging it was to select just three winners. Special recognition goes to the following students, whose work was strongly considered for the top 3 Winning places:

• Aleksandr (Zandr) Badger
• Hasan Sivas
• Leo Richards
• Rehan Joseph

👏 Well done to all students for your creativity, innovation, and hard work.

Acknowledgement:

We extend our sincere thanks to our industry partners for their invaluable on-going support:

• Fujitsu – for supporting the module with industry Lecturers, mentoring students, judging and delivering industry-led insights
• ShipMax Ltd (Phil Rees) – for awards, mentoring, and opportunity pathways
• Hoowla (Adam Curtis & Edd Turtle) – for inspiring industry guest lectures
• Mathew Marl – for an insightful and inspiring guest lecture
• The Engineers and Scientists in Business Fellowship (ESBF) – for inspiring & rewarding our students and funding student prizes

Your contributions are greatly appreciated and continue to enrich the student experience by bringing up-to-date industry insights into the University for our stuents to benefit from which greatly enhances their skills, knowledge and employability. Diolch yn fawr iawn.

Looking Ahead:

While Group 1 has now completed the module, Group 2 students are currently progressing through their projects, we wish them the best of luck and look forward to celebrating their achievements soon.

Da iawn chi – Well done everyone!
Diolch yn fawr iawn – Thank you to all our partners and students.
We look forward to celebrating together in September.
👏🎉

What an inspiring day at the UWTSD Emerging Trends Hackathon 2026, delivered by our Final Year Computing students from the School of Applied Computing. 💻⚙️

Throughout the day, students presented innovative ideas addressing real-life challenges using emerging trends and technologies. The topics explored showed creativity, social awareness, technical thinking, and a strong understanding of how computing can make a positive impact. 💡🚀🌍

This year, our students addressed a wide range of important issues, including:
🎮 Safeguarding children in online video games
♿ Accessibility mapping and navigation for disabled travel
🤖 The Grit Bot – An automatic pavement gritting solution
📚 Supporting students below their expected reading and literacy level
💊 SIDEKICK – A smart medication management application
📶 Public WiFi trust and security challenges
🚗 UWTSD ShareRide App
📱 Doomscrolling and Social Media Well-being
🏠 Assistive robots for home environments

A huge well done to all the teams for their hard work, creativity, teamwork, and professional presentations. It was fantastic to see students identify meaningful problems and thoughtful technology-driven solutions. 👏

Thank you to Elliott Atkins, Matt Davies, Koi Merebark for judging and making the Hackathon a successful and engaging event. 🙏👍

The University’s Annual STEM Degree Exhibition at UWTSD’s iconic IQ building on the SA1 waterfront campus was a great success bringing together the work of the Computing, Software Engineering, Networking & Cybersecurity, Games Design, Games Development, Animation, Electronics and Electrical Engineering students as well as the work of the Manufacturing and Engineering students in a fantastic display of project posters and real-life demonstrations. 🤩

Over sixty students displayed their project work including interactive virtual reality, show reels and interactive sound applications as well as web applications, networking & cybersecurity technology and Machine Learning technology. There was a great buzz around the building as students proudly demonstrated their brilliant final year projects to visitors from industry. ⚙️💻🦾👨🏻‍💻

Congratulations and well done to all our final year students for their hard work and for displaying their projects at the exhibition – Llongyfarchiadau a da iawn i chi gyd 🎉 👏

And finally: Well done to all our dedicated staff who teach and support our students to flourish and actualise their potential. 👏🙏

Q. Final Year Student: Sohaan Sureshkumar

Q. Course: BSc Hons Computing (Software Engineering)

Q. Project title: Virality-to-Profit Dashboard: A Business Intelligence Tool for Organic E-Commerce Sellers

Q. Motivation for choosing the project: I run an organic e-commerce Brand called WaxAwayCo alongside my studies, selling products through Shopify with all marketing done organically on Instagram no paid ads, just content creation. I kept hitting the same wall where I could see my Instagram views in one app and my Shopify profit in another, but there was no way to connect them.

Paid advertisers have metrics like CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) built into their platforms. Organic sellers have nothing. After a viral post, I’d spend hours on spreadsheets trying to answer: “How much profit did that video actually make me?”. My literature review with over 50 academic sources confirmed this wasn’t just my problem it’s a genuine gap across the entire organic social commerce industry. I decided to build the tool I wished existed.

Q. Overview of the practical implementation:
The dashboard is a web application built with PHP 8.3, MySQL, and Chart.js. Users upload two CSV files: Instagram Insights and Shopify Orders and the system processes them through an ETL pipeline:

• Data Extraction: Parse both CSV files, handling different date formats and currency symbols automatically.
• Transformation: Aggregate Instagram metrics by day, clean Shopify data, calculate derived metrics including two novel measures I developed.
• Loading: Store processed data in a normalised MySQL database with four tables, powering all dashboard visualisations.

The core innovation is two new metrics I created specifically for organic e-commerce:

• V2O (Views to Orders): Orders generated per million views. If V2O is 200, every million views produces ~200 orders.
• NPV (Net Profit Value per Million Views): Actual profit per million views after all costs (COGS, shipping, fees, refunds).

The main dashboard is where users upload their Instagram Insights and Shopify Orders CSV files. Once processed, the page displays six KPI cards summarising total views, orders, revenue, net profit, and the two novel metrics, V2O and NPV. Below the cards, a dual-axis line chart plots views against orders over time, revealing how content performance correlates with sales. A daily profit bar chart uses conditional colouring to show profitable days in green and loss-making days in red.

This page provides a deeper breakdown of profitability. The waterfall chart visualises how gross sales reduce to net profit step-by-step, showing exactly how much is lost to cost of goods sold, shipping, payment fees, and refunds. A doughnut chart displays cost proportions at a glance.

The best and worst performing days are ranked by net profit, the day with the highest net profit appears as the best performer, while the day with the lowest (or most negative) net profit is flagged as the worst. This helps sellers quickly identify what’s working and what isn’t.

The automated insights analyse the actual data and generate contextual recommendations. If cost of goods sold exceeds 50% of revenue, it suggests reviewing supplier pricing. If the refund rate exceeds 5%, it flags a potential product quality issue. If shipping costs are disproportionately high, it recommends exploring alternative fulfilment options. These thresholds are based on standard e-commerce benchmarks, giving sellers actionable guidance without needing to interpret the numbers themselves.

Q. Overview of the outcome/conclusion:
The system was tested with 28 test cases achieving 100% pass rate, with calculations verified against manual spreadsheet checks. User evaluation with five organic e-commerce sellers from my target audience produced strong results:

• Overall Rating: 4.6/5
• Visual Design: 4.68/5 (highest category)
• 80% said they would “definitely” use the tool regularly

User feedback was particularly encouraging. One participant called V2O:

“Genius, I can finally see how many views I need to generate sales.”

Another said the waterfall chart “makes accounting simple to understand.”

The project demonstrates that standardised efficiency metrics for organic social commerce  equivalent to what paid advertisers have had for years are both achievable and genuinely valued by sellers.

Q. Advice for students who are interested in completing a University Degree & Final Year project?

• 1. Develop resilience by seeking challenges early. The skills that feel most difficult at the start like independent research, technical problem-solving, presenting your work, become significantly easier with practice. Students who push themselves outside their comfort zone in earlier years tend to find the demands of final year far more manageable.
  
• 2. Solve a problem you actually have. My project worked because I built something I genuinely needed for my own business. When you’re solving your own problem, you understand the user deeply, you stay motivated when things get hard, and you can test with real data from day one. Don’t pick a project because it sounds impressive, pick something you’ll still care about when the code isn’t working.
  
• 3. Start your literature review early. I reviewed more than 50 sources, and that foundation shaped everything else. When I found papers confirming organic ROI measurement was an unsolved problem, it validated my entire approach. The literature review isn’t a box to tick, it’s where you discover whether your idea has real merit.
  
• 4. Scope ruthlessly. I could have added TikTok support, API integration, user accounts, and a dozen other features. But a polished tool that does three things excellently beats a sprawling mess that does ten things poorly. Define your minimum viable project, build that well, and put everything else in “Future Work.”

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