Competitive Landscape Analysis for Riipen

Riipen, a company focused on connecting students with real-world projects, seeks to understand its position in the market by analyzing its competitive landscape. The goal of this project is to identify and evaluate key competitors in the educational technology and experiential learning sectors. Students will apply their classroom knowledge of market research and strategic analysis to gather data on competitors' strengths, weaknesses, market positioning, and unique offerings. This project will involve researching industry trends, analyzing competitors' business models, and identifying potential opportunities and threats for Riipen. By completing this project, students will gain practical experience in competitive analysis and strategic planning, enhancing their understanding of market dynamics. - Conduct market research to identify key competitors in the educational technology sector. - Analyze competitors' strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning. - Identify industry trends and potential opportunities for Riipen. - Provide strategic recommendations based on the analysis.

Open Source REST API Ruby Client

The goal of this project is to create an open source ruby package that interacts with a 3rd party REST API. This project will involve several different steps for the students, including: Researching and understanding the 3rd party API and its capabilities. Developing a ruby package that interacts with the API. Testing the package to ensure it is working properly. Optimizing the package for performance. Writing documentation for the package.

Cloud Infrastructure Review and Audit

The main goal of the project will be to take an existing cloud architecture for a modern web application, review and audit it against industry standards for security, scalability, availability and consider other factors such as pricing and produce either a proof of concept or a written report which details possible improvements and different services which can be better utilized to improve the cloud architecture.

Student project template design and writing

Our company Riipen, has a web application in which educators match with companies to provide a project based learning opportunity for their students. Companies craft and create projects based on their real world company needs which would be great learning opportunities for the students. To help this process, Riipen also provide companies with project templates which they can use to get the ball rolling. These project templates are usually generic projects which could be applied to a specific company or a specific industry which then the company takes and updates and makes specific to their needs. We are currently in the process of trying to create even more project templates in which our companies would use to further provide more learning experiences for students. We would like help in crafting these project templates and who better to do it than the people who will benefit the most from the projects.

Mobile App UI / UX Design & Prototype

Our company would like to explore designing a prototype for a native mobile application version of the Riipen platform ( app.riipen.com ). This prototype will need to cover the following basic user workflows: Signing up Logging in General navigation across the application Browsing content Chat Matchmaking Unique challenges in building a Riipen mobile application: Riipen has 3 different user type Riipen has a full scale messaging, meeting, and video chat system Riipen has heavily customized 'request' workflows for educators and employers Riipen has unique project management workflows for students

Intermediate Programming Challenge

This project represents Riipen's "Gold Mine" programmging problem. Click here to see the Github repository. Exercise Given a gold mine of n * m dimensions, design an algorithm for a gold miner to collect as much gold as possible. Each field in this mine contains a positive integer which is the amount of gold in that space. The miner starts at the first column but can be at any row. The miner can only move right, diagonally right and up, or diagonally right and down. GoldMine Diagram If the miner leaves the mine for any reason (goes outside the dimensions of the mine), gold collection will cease and the final score will be the current score. If the miner lands on a section of the mine that has zero gold (an integer value of 0), gold collection will cease and the final score will be the current score. Rules - Use your best discretion with the design of your solution - You can ask questions - You are free to add packages, tools, or improvements as you see fit - We expect you write the kind of feature you would put into production, including tests and documentation as you see fit Submission Please submit a ZIP file which contains your solution. Architecture The current naive approach to mining can be found in `src/move.js`. Your job will be to improve upon the existing implementation in order to collect as much gold as possible. If you wish to start your miner at a particular row of a given mine, you can change the `config.js` file to fit your needs. Contact We encourage you to use your best discretion, but also to ask questions and communicate if you need it.

Pen Testing New Application

Riipen has recently created a whole new product for our users. You are currently on it! We would like a group of students to design and perform a pen test on this application. The final deliverable should include a written report detailing how the test was conducted, what tests passed, what tests failed, recommendations for mitigation strategies, and any further notes from the testers. For the actual testing, instead of using a live environment, a test environment will be provided to students so they can test without fear of actually damaging any real systems. A walk through of the UI portal, as well as the technical details of the API will be provided to students before they begin testing.

Disaster Recovery Planning

Riipen is currently in the process of revamping its incident response plan and would like groups of students to review and make improvements to it. Items of concern in our current response plan include: Response alert, escalation, and plan invocation Impact assessments Backup recovery and infrastructure repair Disaster team roles Media Insurance Financial and legal concerns Riipen will provide our current disaster response planning documents and policies to the participarting team of students. We would like to have the students develop a new version of the plan (and any accompanying documents needed) which addresses any issues they can find with the current plan. This might include: Missed topics of concern Changes to existing topics Including the use of available tools etc. Riipen will be available to provide feedback to students and any needed information to facilitate this project.

Disaster Recovery Planning

Riipen is currently in the process of revamping its incident response plan and would like groups of students to review and make improvements to it.

Riipen Academy CMS

Riipen currently has a hard coded help section within its web platform. In order to make changes to content or create new content, software developers need to get involved which is a waste of effort and resources. We would like to build a simple CMS around this help system in order for non developers to maintain and operate it. We would like to somehow make this "sub-section" of our website integrate as seamlessly as possibly with the existing platform. How it works today, is that there is a link in the footer of the main site which simply navigates to the Riipen Academy and it is embedded right into the existing website. We would like students to find a way to use or create a CMS technology that can operate in a similar manor. The ultimate goal of this project is to devise a way to not need Riipen software developers to get involved whenever a content change is needed inside of the Riipen Academy. Using a CMS technology, this should be possible.

Product User Experience Research

The Riipen platform continually undergoes iterations of design and user experience with small improvements being made constantly and consistently. We would like the students groups to be apart of the next round of user experience iteration. The Riipen team would like to focus on improvements in a few key areas to help improve the platform in the coming months, namely being: Student adoption Student on-boarding Student continued engagement What these three items really cover are: Why does a student join Riipen? How do they join Riipen and what is that experience like? What makes a student want to stay on Riipen for further engagement? Phase 1 – Project Plan: Your organization will work directly with the instructor to finalize the project scope. Following that, the first meeting between the student-researchers and your organization will be arranged for April. Phase 2 – Project Execution: Students will work on deliverables outlined in the project plan. Teams will have a mid-term check in with organizational representative(s) to update on project tasks. Phase 3 - Outcome - Report and Presentation: Students will submit a 10-page report on the insights and recommendations for your organization. The conclusions will be presented in the final class. Organization representative(s) are invited to participate in these presentations virtually and will be provided the slide deck.

Big Data and Cloud Based Application Development

Riipen has a number of search, or browse, pages scattered throughout its web platform. We would like students to: a) redesign these pages to accommodate some new functionality b) implement new optimized search functionality through the use of elastic search c) implement recommendations based on given search criteria d) setup up a logging infrastructure to capture what is being searched for and by whom Youtube submission of project Code uploaded to GitHub

Search Engine in The Wild

Riipen has a large set of data being created every day from its online platform. A challenge we face is for users to be able get the information they need when they need it by searching appropriate fields, or by conducting a free text search ala Google. Given a large relational data set, students should be able to provide a storage facility for said data such as a relational database, or document store, with an API available to search the data. The data should be searchable by: Direct matching fields Given a field name and a value, the API should be able to find documents containing that field with that exact value. An example would be: Find all documents which have a name of "My Document". There are three types of fields which should be able to be matched: text values, number values, and date values. Fuzzy matching fields Given a field name and a value, the API should be able to find documents which container that field with "mostly" the given value. An example would be: find all documents which have a name of "My Docu" which would return a document with the name of "My Document" Fuzzy matching multiple fields by weight Given a list of field name and a weight, the API should be able to find documents which contain those fields with their corresponding matching fuzzy values, and rank them by their fields weight. For example, find all documents by the search term "My Document", but only search the "name" and "summary" fields and weight the name as 80% and summary as 20%. Two document each with the values "My Document" in their name and summaries should be found, however, the document with the value in the "name" field should be ranked first. Combining search techniques Given any number of search criteria as listed above, perform a search based on all criteria. All the criteria should have the option of being "must be present" or "may be present". For example, a search might include find all documents whose name are "My Document" and whose summary fuzzily contains the text "this is a summary". This would be an example of "must be present" as each search criteria must be met. Another example would be find all documents whose name are "My Document" or whose summary fuzzily contains the text "this is a summary". This would be an example of "may be present" as only one of the present search criteria must be met. Restrictions: The API provided in which to search can be anything from a command line interface to a UI. The interface must not make use of raw SQL. A report describing the complete project life-cycle. A class presentation with demo, if possible.