What is something this course does right?
This course had great pacing, the deliverables each week were very doable. Professor Hedaoo is also an excellent teacher, he made sure that everyone was assigned to the projects they were most passionate about and checked in regularly. He genuinely wants his students to learn and succeed in his classes. For example, our team was struggling with organizing our project and communicating with the external industry team. We decided to schedule an office hours appointment with Professor Headaoo to go over the issues we were having. He was helpful and reestablished the expectations of the course to ease our concerns over us not meeting the requirements of upcoming assignments due to lack of communication from the external team. The TA has also been very understanding with the issues we have been facing and provided constructive weekly feedback. The extra credit in this class is also very generous and much appreciated. Discussion posts are relevant to the course and allows us to participate with classmates outside of our team which is nice.
What are some of the weaknesses for this course?
There are not a lot of weaknesses for this class. I think the course is very flexible, it only requires a minimum of 10hrs a week of work which is reasonable. Professor Headaoo makes it clear that he is not expecting a fully complete and working app/product at the end of the quarter. I guess the only thing with this class is that it is a bit of a slower start than other classes. I don’t mind, but I think we could’ve had more time to research or work on our projects if we were assigned to a project sooner. But overall, no real weaknesses as I am sure it is difficult matching students with the project and partners of their choice.
What are some improvements that this course can implement?
The course is pretty straight forward, so there isn’t much I can think of that could improve the course. When looking at the upcoming assignments for the final deliverables for the course, I would like to have had some examples as to what the professor is expecting. For example, the “Create Poster” assignment coming up requests that we provide a picture of our project in action. I would just like to see an example of a more backend project on a poster since our project is mainly working with DynamoDB and calling APIs. So, we will need to connect with a TA or the professor to better understand how we might show the working project on AWS or DynamoDB.
What are any serious issues that could affect the quality of this course?
I don’t think there are any “serious” issues that could affect the quality of this course. However, it would be helpful to vet some of the capstone projects that are part of an external industry project. Our capstone team was under the assumption that we would be collaborating with an established company that had a more comprehensive codebase. However, we came into a project that did not have a lot of direction. The industry team was a student-lead project and a little unorganized. We were able to get ahead of it and contact the professor as previously mentioned. However, our team was disappointed, we were extremely excited to get to work with an industry project. The mentorship would have been a great asset but it was other capstone/former capstone students working on the project. I am sure that it is of no fault of the instructors, but maybe the capstone website could provide a link to the industry project in order to gauge the overall progress of the application.
