Fall Courses

I am teaching two courses this fall, and would like you to help me decide what my students should work on. The first course, “CSC301: Introduction to Software Engineering”, is aimed at third-year students (juniors in American parlance), and covers agile software development processes, design patterns, and other introductory material. Students work in four-person teams on a course-long project broken into four or five assignments; peer evaluation is part of their grade, and there’s a written exam at the end. This past winter, the project was a to-do list plugin for Facebook; thanks to some technical support from Refresh Partners, all of the teams managed to build something usable.

The second course is “CSC491: Computer Science Capstone”, which has taken the place of the CSC494/495 directed studies projects I used to run (although I still sometimes take students into CSC494/495 if they can’t fit CSC491 into their timetable). In the past, I’ve matched students up with clients—faculty in other departments, local non-profits, startups, open source organizations—who want something built. Over the course of the term, the students go through the entire development cycle: requirements gathering, design, construction, testing, deployment, and post-mortem evaluation. The range of projects last winter was pretty broad, but all the clients seemed happy with what they got.

So, what should I do with these courses this fall? Here’s just a few of my options:

1. Get the Capstone students to move (most of) DrProject to Django. The aim would be to create the "Trac 2.0" that DrProject was meant to be; I think it's ambitious, but doable, and would be a great introduction to open source/agile development. The downside is that students wouldn't be working directly with real clients, which they have enjoyed and valued in the past.
2. Have the Capstone students do external consulting projects as before. Upside: making real people's lives better, and strengthening ties between this department and the community. Downside: they don't get the experience of working in a larger group on a larger code base, and it's a lot more work for me :-).
3. Have the CSC301 students build another Facebook app. Upside: Facebook is still hot (well, lukewarm), and I know how to avoid some of last term's potholes. Downside: a lot of third-year students haven't done web programming before, so it's a far-from-level playing field.
4. Have the CSC301 students build a desktop GUI application using Swing, wxPython, or something like that. Upside: level playing field. Downside: finding something that's worth build.

There are lots of other possibilities; if you’d like to add one to the pile, or cast a vote for one of the ones above, I’m easy to reach.