CS@NAU: Senior Capstone Design

Capstone Project Selection Process

Although the growth in our CS program has substantially increased the numbers of seniors (and thus project teams), each year, it is not uncommon for there to be more projects in the pool than there are teams. Our process for selecting projects to do each fall is completely transparent, and is driven primarily by the interests of the students:

  1. CS Capstone coordinator puts out the call for project proposals to our Potential Capstone Sponsor mailing list as the summer begins. Follow-up reminders are sent regularly in the next months.
  2. Potential sponsors with an idea for a project generally start by contacting the Capstone Coordinator informally (email, phone call) to outline the project and get feedback on whether it basically sounds appropriate.
  3. Potential sponsor then writes up the project description (see "How to submit" below for template) and submits the draft. The Sponsor and the Capstone coordinator frequently go back and forth a bit, refining and scoping the project description to meet both the sponsor's needs for functionality and the faculty's requirements for complexity and challenge.
  4. Once refined, the project descriptions are posted to a web page accessible to students.
  5. Students review the project descriptions and submit their first, second, and third choices of project to faculty in a formal memo.
  6. CS faculty gather as a group to review projects and assign teams. Projects are reviewed primarily based on student preferences, project complexity, skillsets in the student pool; a secondary criterion is faculty interest in mentoring a particular project. Based on this discussion, students are matched to projects, and a CS faculty mentor is assigned to each team.
  7. Project sponsors are notified of project selection outcomes. Successful projects proceed at start immediately with Phase 1. CS faculty mentors coordinate with each other on deliverables, etc., ensuring consistent quality and learning experiences across all projects.

We have found that allowing student interest to drive the selections is the best way to ensure excited and committed project teams and, ultimately, to optimize project outcomes. Some effort invested in the project description itself tends to yield results: project descriptions that portray an exciting project clearly connected to a client's business processes are consistently popular; nothing motivates students more than the thought that real people will solve real problems with their software. Of course, student interests vary somewhat year to year, so often projects that evoked little interest in one year have been super popular when resubmitted the next year.

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