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 semester 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 one to two months before semester start. Follow-up reminders are sent regularly thereafter.

  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. It is a good idea to start this process as soon as possible.

  3. Potential sponsor then writes up the project description (see "How to submit" on the Sponsor Home Page for template) and submits the draft. The Sponsor and the Capstone coordinator commonly 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 project choices to the Faculty in a formal memo.

  6. Project sponsors are notified of project selection outcomes as soon as possible. Successful projects start immediately with Phase 1. The specially-trained Graduate Student 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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