An Experience Advising Senior Projects Spanning to Multiple Student Generations
Senior Project or Capstone Project is very crucial in Engineering or Information Technology Degree Curriculums. The course aims at students to apply their entire knowledge and skills to solve an engineering or technology problem. They also require to develop their planning skills, responsibility, autonomous learning skills, problem solving skills, analytical skills, presentation skills, and report writing skills. However, assigning a project topic is one of the most important step in senior project development since a good topic can push the students to develop various skills essential to their career. Assigning a real-world problem as a senior project can push the students to understand to the user requirement deeply, to practice communicate with real users, and practice their endurance to analyze the system as what the user actually required. All the above skills are practiced along with design and development with knowledge and skills necessary to their career, such as planning skills, responsibility, autonomous learning skills, problem solving skills, analytical skills, presentation skills, and report writing skills. After finishing the development, the students must deploy the system, and have the user acceptance test. All of these can be accomplished if and only if the project topic is a real-world problem with real users and real situations. Code Shoppy
In the 2015 academic years, we tried assigning eight real-world problems as our student’s senior projects[1]. The objective of this is to develop our computer engineering student’s skills more completely and professionally with CDIO [2] concept. The evaluations include the project presentations and the completeness of the project, which are the project deployment with user satisfaction surveys, and the number of national conference publications. The results show that 5 from 8 projects can be deployed and operated by the users in actual situations. The satisfaction score of all projects are between 4.03 to 4.80 from the full scale of 5. The projects can be published to 5 national or international publications. However, since the topics are real-world problems, the project developments are not finished with the academic years. Some of those require extensive development in the next academic year. The purpose of this research is to study the experience of managing three multiple-year spanning projects. We collect the project development results until the 2017 academic year, and evaluate the project with the project presentations and the completeness of the project, including the project deployment with user satisfaction surveys, and the number of national/international publications. We also explain the problems occurred, our solutions, and suggestions in this article.To deliver real-world experiences to students, there are many approaches introduced. In Singapore, a curriculum is integrated with industrial-grade laboratory equipment and months of internships [3]. Turku University in Finland [4] introduces a center of a project-based learning environment, which is managed like a company. The center accepts small ICT projects from real customers and distributes to ICT students taking a project course or an internship. Some projects receive payments from customers. A joint Professional Summer School Sprint was organized among 3 universities in Finland [5]. It was a 2-week boot camp for multidisciplinary groups of students to seek for innovation to solve a real business problem from partner companies. Though, some students dropped out from the camp, but most of them enjoyed the experience. However, students suggested that the customer companies should be trained more for the course to have more realistic expectations what can be done in 2 weeks, or send an employee to participate the course full time. In Portugal, a curricular capstone-internships approach is introduced [6]. The approach is used in an Informatics Engineering curricular with capstone-internship project in the last semester. A web-based platform for the capstone project management between the external organizations and the course manager has been used since 2004. However, since the communication with external organizations became very important, the use of the web-based management system has been indispensable. Therefore, working with a real-world project from an external organization has never been easy in anywhere. C.Teaching and Learning in Our Senior Project Course Our senior project course includes 3 hours of class per week for 2 semesters. Project-based Learning is the main teaching and learning method. Therefore, the students practice their practical engineering skills in groups of at most three, and present their project progress every month. All student groups present their final project in the last week of the second semester. Furthermore, every group must be advised with their advisor every week, and submit their advisory form weekly.
Senior Project or Capstone Project is very crucial in Engineering or Information Technology Degree Curriculums. The course aims at students to apply their entire knowledge and skills to solve an engineering or technology problem. They also require to develop their planning skills, responsibility, autonomous learning skills, problem solving skills, analytical skills, presentation skills, and report writing skills. However, assigning a project topic is one of the most important step in senior project development since a good topic can push the students to develop various skills essential to their career. Assigning a real-world problem as a senior project can push the students to understand to the user requirement deeply, to practice communicate with real users, and practice their endurance to analyze the system as what the user actually required. All the above skills are practiced along with design and development with knowledge and skills necessary to their career, such as planning skills, responsibility, autonomous learning skills, problem solving skills, analytical skills, presentation skills, and report writing skills. After finishing the development, the students must deploy the system, and have the user acceptance test. All of these can be accomplished if and only if the project topic is a real-world problem with real users and real situations. Code Shoppy
In the 2015 academic years, we tried assigning eight real-world problems as our student’s senior projects[1]. The objective of this is to develop our computer engineering student’s skills more completely and professionally with CDIO [2] concept. The evaluations include the project presentations and the completeness of the project, which are the project deployment with user satisfaction surveys, and the number of national conference publications. The results show that 5 from 8 projects can be deployed and operated by the users in actual situations. The satisfaction score of all projects are between 4.03 to 4.80 from the full scale of 5. The projects can be published to 5 national or international publications. However, since the topics are real-world problems, the project developments are not finished with the academic years. Some of those require extensive development in the next academic year. The purpose of this research is to study the experience of managing three multiple-year spanning projects. We collect the project development results until the 2017 academic year, and evaluate the project with the project presentations and the completeness of the project, including the project deployment with user satisfaction surveys, and the number of national/international publications. We also explain the problems occurred, our solutions, and suggestions in this article.To deliver real-world experiences to students, there are many approaches introduced. In Singapore, a curriculum is integrated with industrial-grade laboratory equipment and months of internships [3]. Turku University in Finland [4] introduces a center of a project-based learning environment, which is managed like a company. The center accepts small ICT projects from real customers and distributes to ICT students taking a project course or an internship. Some projects receive payments from customers. A joint Professional Summer School Sprint was organized among 3 universities in Finland [5]. It was a 2-week boot camp for multidisciplinary groups of students to seek for innovation to solve a real business problem from partner companies. Though, some students dropped out from the camp, but most of them enjoyed the experience. However, students suggested that the customer companies should be trained more for the course to have more realistic expectations what can be done in 2 weeks, or send an employee to participate the course full time. In Portugal, a curricular capstone-internships approach is introduced [6]. The approach is used in an Informatics Engineering curricular with capstone-internship project in the last semester. A web-based platform for the capstone project management between the external organizations and the course manager has been used since 2004. However, since the communication with external organizations became very important, the use of the web-based management system has been indispensable. Therefore, working with a real-world project from an external organization has never been easy in anywhere. C.Teaching and Learning in Our Senior Project Course Our senior project course includes 3 hours of class per week for 2 semesters. Project-based Learning is the main teaching and learning method. Therefore, the students practice their practical engineering skills in groups of at most three, and present their project progress every month. All student groups present their final project in the last week of the second semester. Furthermore, every group must be advised with their advisor every week, and submit their advisory form weekly.
This article describes the process applying to multiple-year spanning senior projects, which are senior projects that require many years to develop. With real requirements from organizations, we must prepare the topics and the next generation students long before the semester starts. Regular meetings with the first generation and the owner organization are also required. Additionally, the students must allocate a few months for deployment and user satisfaction surveys. Our results show that 2 out of 3 multiple-year spanning projects can complete successfully. However, one cannot finish on schedule due to the user requirement changes. The problems occur can be solved with extra efforts. Therefore, the department still continues with this type of senior projects to improve our student’s ability to the real industry
No comments:
Post a Comment