What is “scientific novelty” in an IT dissertation: from idea to defense

Purpose: Explain the main criterion of scientific work in simple language. The most frequent stupor in undergraduates occurs when writing the introduction to the dissertation, when it is necessary to formulate “scientific novelty”. The student thinks, "I wrote a great marketplace in Python and React, everything works, tests are green." Is that not enough?” Enough for a commercial release. For a master's thesis, no. What's the difference? Simply designing a system (albeit a very complex one) is an engineering challenge. Scientific novelty occurs when you solve a problem that has never been solved before or has been solved less effectively. An example from life: Imagine creating an EdTech platform for an online school. Engineering approach: Design a database, write an API on Django, screw up payment and make a beautiful frontend. It's a great bachelor's degree. Scientific approach: Introduce its own machine learning algorithm into this platform, which analyzes what minute of video lesson users most often pause, and based on this, automatically adjusts the complexity of the next tests. The novelty here will be the algorithm itself and the proof that your mathematical model increases student engagement by 15% over standard methods. Scientific novelty at the PAS Department is your personal contribution to the development of technologies, improving the metrics of speed, reliability or accuracy of software systems.