CS476 - Course Information and Policies

 

Click here to see: Course Syllabus

Policies and Best Practices

• Formal policy and process for dealing with non-performing team members
  • Template/example: Formal memo to dysfunctional teammate(s)
  • Template/example: Response memo back to team
• Formal policy and process for dealing with dysfunctional teams
• Capstone Electronic Meeting Guidelines: for e-meetings with clients or team mentors
• Late Work Policy (open only in case of emergency!)
• Engineering Grading Scale (from American Society for Engineering Education). What does a grade really mean? The expectations behind grades.
• Nice article on managing non-performing team members
• Are you in the Honors Program and wanting to complete an Honors Capstone? Click here to find out how Honors Capstones work.

Computing Resources for supporting your Capstone project

ABSOLUTE COURSE RULE: DO NOT CONTACT ITS FOR ANY PROJECT SERVICES

---------------------------------------- ALL REQUESTS FOR ANY SUPPORTING TECHNOLOGY

---------------------------------------- MUST BE PRESENTED TO THE COURSE FACILITATOR FIRST

Individual projects vary widely, of course, with computing needs varying accordingly. In CS, we are lucky that the main "supplies" we need for our projects are generally free: the laptops/desktops that we already use every day, and open source packages, IDEs, and other tools. There are some projects, however, that may need special resources; here are a couple of useful links.

• NAU ITS Policy Document for creating webapps/sites for Capstone clients that are hosted on NAU servers.
• Getting access to high-performance computing power (project with machine learning, big data, and other compute-intensive stuff)
• Cloud-hosting for webapps and mobile app backends.

Fun and Useful links

• Some Tips for improving your presentations
• Check out this compact little book: "Even a Geek can Speak" by Joey Asher. Really nice little hands-on guide for technical folks like us, on how to give good and effective presentations. Excellent addition to anyone's professional bookshelf. And dirt cheap too!
• Dr D's distilled Tech Writing QuickRef for improving your writing, based on 15 years experience with what Capstone teams often fall down on.
• VIDEO PRESENTATIONS. Especially during COVID-time, many presentations may be delivered as videos rather than to a live audience. To help with this, I did some legwork to get you a start. Here is a quick overview of some ideas and options for doing your videos. This is by no means complete, it's just a leg up to get you started on your own ideas! We also were able to collect some great "best practice" ideas from Spring 2020 Capstone teams that produced excellent videos of their final presentations.

About the Instructors

The CS Capstone Sequence is a collaborative effort between CS faculty and staff aimed at efficiently delivering a superior Capstone experience. The course is organized by one lead CS faculty member ("course organizer") who has overall responsibility for all aspects of the course. Each team is also individually mentored by a "team mentor" who is part of the course delivery team managed by the course organizer.

Course Organizer(s)

The course organizer is the faculty member who collects and organizes the projects, sets the schedule for the course and generally makes sure that things are rolling smoothly. In the initial semester (CS476), this will faculty member will be playing a more leading role, giving lectures and actively running in-class activities. In the second semester (CS486), this person continues to make scheduling arrangements, but the team mentors take a more intensive role in close mentoring of teams.

Current: Dr. Michael Leverington Educator School of Informatics, Computing and Cyber Systems (SICCS) Office: Rm. 243, Engineering Building (bldg. 69) Email: Michael.Leverington@nau.edu Student Access Times: See BBLearn Main Page

On Sabbatical: Dr. Eck Doerry

 

Team mentors

Faculty mentors are a vital part of the CS Capstone concept, bringing a wide variety of expertise to bear on their assigned Capstone teams. Team mentors may be CS faculty members or graduate students and work closely with the team to monitor progress, give guidance on both technical and team/client management issues, and grade all team deliverables over the course of the term.