I think it's a great requirement. So many of the projects would turn into CRUD apps. It's Computer Science and there are a lot of other interesting things to do which students will never consider without making them stretch a bit. I think too many programmers are devoting their efforts to geo/social/commerce/blog apps and are losing sight of all other problems.

My senior project was on audio synthesis, granular synthesis in particular. I'd recommend any project in the generative art or audio space.