Capstone Project

This year-long course for undergraduate students is designed to provide students with the opportunity to apply, in a team setting, what they have learned in their major to a project sponsored by an industrial company or a state agency. These projects afford students an opportunity to apply their technical skill and knowledge of engineering principles to the development of a complex, team-oriented software project, system or device. As they work on their capstone project, students have the opportunity to manage a project from beginning to end, learning how to deal with unexpected outcomes along the way. An excellent training ground for working in industry, the capstone project mirrors the type of experiences graduates will face when they begin their careers in engineering.

Industry mentors:

• Provide project descriptions.
  
• Attend an orientation meeting, so mentors can be informed as to the objectives and process of the course and their responsibilities.
  
• Provide specialized hardware and software required to do the project.
  
• Meet or teleconference with project teams at least bi-weekly to provide technical assistance and assess progress.
  
• Provide a bi-weekly assessment report on students’ progress based on project meetings and weekly progress reports.

Student teams:

• Form a project team with designated roles based on their interests and skills.
  
• Attend weekly lectures and project meetings with their mentors and the instructor and devote 10hrs/week to their project.
  
• Evaluate peer performance.

School of Computing and Informatics:

• Provide a dedicated workstation in its capstone lab for each project team loaded with standard operating system, programming language, project management and database tools and software.
• Provide course instructor who will be responsible for monitoring and assessing student progress and overall performance.

Industry partners should be aware that SCI does not guarantee that the final deliverable will be market ready and SCI assumes no liability in connection with the deliverables of the capstone projects.

Sample Capstone Projects

GoNGO.org Project:

Go NGO is helping the nonprofit sector in Spanish speaking countries (primarily Mexico) to make better use of online communication technologies to help them better network with their clients and communities they serve, their volunteers, donors and other nonprofits.

GoNGO is a collaborative effort between two Arizona State University college groups: W.P. Carey College of Business and the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering. The business team created the business plan and the engineering team created the website and all the required functionality. GoNGO was implemented using the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) software bundle.

“Over the last three years, students from the School of Computing and Informatics have been an essential part of the GoNGO team. In partnership with students from the W.P. Carey School of Business, SCI students helped dramatically improve GoNGO's effectiveness at serving nonprofit clients throughout Mexico by helping define the organization's strategy. SCI students also contributed the technical knowledge and skills required to move the organization from design to execution by translating GoNGO's product road map into tangible services for our clients. SCI students have been an invaluable resource to GoNGO and I look forward to continuing our partnership in the future.”
Jon Beekman, CEO, GoNGO.org

Flypaper Studio Memory Game:

Flypaper is the easiest way to create, edit and share Flash-quality content that can be used for live presentations or over the Web. It allows a user to engage their next audience, meeting, interview, training session or event – or impress friends and family.

Flypaper is a C# based development editor that takes specifically compiled flash objects and creates a user defined output file that is a compiled flash animation. The input flash objects are known as components. Flypaper uses components to provide additional functionality and an enriched user experience. Our capstone team is designing and implementing one such component – a highly customizable memory-matching card game. This component is a flash object designed in Adobe Flash, and extended with the Actionscript API provided by the Flypaper developers.

“Over the last several months, I worked closely with the ASU capstone team, designing an interactive Memory Card Game for Flypaper. The team delivered incremental builds that satisfied requirements and addressed bug fixes. The end product was a Flypaper Component that will be available in our Version 1 release”.
Vincent Serpico, Vice-President, Development, Flypaper Studio, Inc.