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A Tale of Two Capstones

Published: 28 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Unbeknownst to the authors, faculty at two separate colleges were simultaneously struggling to design a capstone course. Interestingly, the resulting course structures could not be more different. The nature of the project, the teams, the faculty, the course length, and other aspects were markedly different, yet both courses were a success. This paper describes each course and analyzes their efficacy by comparing to student outcomes, methodology and project complexity.

References

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Bloomfield, A., Sherriff, M., and Williams, K. 2014. A service learning practicum capstone. In Proceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 265--270. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2538862.2538974
[2]
Clear, T., et al. 2001. Resources for instructors of capstone courses in computing. In Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE-WGR '01). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 93--113. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/572133.572135
[3]
Engelsma, J. 2014. Best practices for industry-sponsored CS capstone courses. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges. 30.1 (2014): 18--28.
[4]
Goold, A. 2003. Providing process for projects in capstone courses. In Proceedings of the 8th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE '03), David Finkel (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 26--29. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/961511.961522
[5]
Helps, R., Ekstrom, J., and Lunt, B. 2015. IT Capstone Course Structure for Success. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education (SIGITE '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 27--32. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2808006.2808024
[6]
Lunt, B., et al. 2008. Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Information Technology. Technical Report. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
[7]
Wright, K. 2010.Capstone programming courses considered harmful. Communications of the ACM. 53.4 (2010): 124--127. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1721654.1721689
[8]
Zilora, S. 2015. Industry-Emulated Projects in the Classroom. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education (SIGITE '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 115--119. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2808006.2808029

Cited By

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  • (2025)Computing Capstone Courses as Preparation for Practice: A Global Survey of InstructorsACM Inroads10.1145/371588016:1(26-39)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2025
  • (2023)Improving a Model-Based Software Engineering Capstone CourseTowards a Collaborative Society Through Creative Learning10.1007/978-3-031-43393-1_51(567-578)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Towards unified management of software capstone projects in Saudi universities: a survey-based studyArab Gulf Journal of Scientific Research10.1108/AGJSR-04-2022-003740:2(118-138)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2022
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SIGITE '16: Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education
September 2016
188 pages
ISBN:9781450344524
DOI:10.1145/2978192
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 September 2016

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Author Tags

  1. capstone
  2. computer information systems
  3. course
  4. curriculum
  5. industry
  6. information technology
  7. international
  8. project
  9. team

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SIGITE/RIIT 2016
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SIGITE '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 67 submissions, 39%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 176 of 429 submissions, 41%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Computing Capstone Courses as Preparation for Practice: A Global Survey of InstructorsACM Inroads10.1145/371588016:1(26-39)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2025
  • (2023)Improving a Model-Based Software Engineering Capstone CourseTowards a Collaborative Society Through Creative Learning10.1007/978-3-031-43393-1_51(567-578)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Towards unified management of software capstone projects in Saudi universities: a survey-based studyArab Gulf Journal of Scientific Research10.1108/AGJSR-04-2022-003740:2(118-138)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2022
  • (2019)Redesigning a Software Development Course as a Preparation for a CapstoneProceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3287324.3287498(153-159)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2019

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