We used our computer programming skills to help tackle unemployment

Connor, Matthew and Jordan
Connor, Matthew and Jordan
Undergraduate students
BSc Physics
Areas of unemployment exist in any city. For their third year industrial group project, Connor Sheppard, Matthew Rowland and Jordan Foster worked with the Sheffield City Region local government institution to use their computer programming skills to identify the best sites to create low-skilled jobs.

Sheffield City Region had identified two main barriers to solving low-skilled unemployment within the region: the economic viability of public transport, and journey time. Focusing on Sheffield, our students started their work by gathering data to identify the highest areas of low-skilled unemployment, and then began building a computer model using Graph Theory.

They presented initial findings to Sheffield City Region in December of their third year, and concluded that it was difficult to travel around the city between the most deprived areas, and identified a number of potential locations for low-skilled job sites and transport bottlenecks.


This project has really highlighted how studying physics gives you the ability to tackle problems from real life in a number of sectors.

Jordan Foster

BSc Physics

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