Computer Science Capstone Design

Task: Final Course Evaluation

Overview

Course evaluations represent an important way in which you "participate" in this course and, more broadly, in shaping our Computer Science program. The Capstone sequence, in particular, is an especially difficult course to design and deliver: there are multiple projects, each requiring unique skillsets, distributed across a student cohort that also has varying and still developing skillsets. The challenge in organizing this course, therefore, revolves around how best to help gel previous training in software engineering and design and the many practical (programming) skills into effective, real-world software project planning and execution.

Our basic concept for Capstone, of course, is to combine step-by-step mentoring personalized to each team/project through all of the key stages of project development, with individual mentoring complemented by some lecture/discussion on the general principles or best practices that we are shooting to achieve in each step: a combination of theory review but with primary emphasis on practical, real-world application; all while focusing on the other Capstone core learning goals related to effective oral and written technical communication.

The course eval is just like that for other courses (because the university only does "one size fits all" for course evals, sigh), but it's important to modify your approach to reflect the unique Capstone structure. In particular:

1. First, try to reflect on the standard questions from "the Capstone perspective". This isn't like a regular course, where you sort of get spoon-fed the material and led by the hand through X chapters of some book. It's a specially designed hybrid between school and real life: a semi-independent consulting experience where the focus isn't on teaching you new technical material (you do that yourself now), but just on mentoring to smooth out the bumps as you learn to fly on your own. Thus, you need to think "was the course a good supportive framework for our own self-motivated team effort?" rather than "did it teach me a bunch of technical material?".
2. Second, when you add written comments in the eval, please indicate *in each comment* the name of your team's mentor. So something like "Joe Mentor: Joe was super at this/that, etc.". It's important to label each answer with the mentor name, since the eval answers all get lumped into per-question pools when we see them. This way, we can direct the appropriate feedback to the correct mentors!

Deliverables

1. Complete the course eval using the NAU course eval system, as usual.
2. Find the page in the eval system that lists out the "Evals that you've completed" and snapshot this page.
3. Make sure that your snapshot clearly shows your name, and that this course shows up clearly in the list of completed evals.
4. Turn the snapshot into a pdf document suitable for upload.
5. Upload your pdf eval into BBlearn, using the assignment uploader provided, before the deadline shown.