A request for help

[Harke Thomas S <harke at amisk.cs.ualberta.ca>]

Hello,

I am a computing science student who will be taking a software engineering
course in January.  A major part of the course is a group project.  I was 
wondering if you have any suggestions for interesting projects.

Ideally the project:
  1) would not duplicate the efforts of others; 
  2) would be of use to someone;
  3) would be implementable within a semester by a group of 5-6 students
  4) should not be too abstract or dry, as I'll have to convince others
     to work on it.

I have a strong background in math - previously I'd gotten a masters degree & 
was studying algebraic topology & knot theory.  But since this course is a
senior year undergrad course, the other students in the group are not likely
to have nearly the same math background, so the math involved should not be
too cryptic.  I was thinking that a knot/link editor which calculated various
invariants might do, but I don't know the extent of what anybody else has done
in this area (I know you have a basic editor at your ftp site), and I also
wonder if the algebra would be too much for the rest of the group.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.  Thank you for your time.

Tom Harke