As the quarter is coming to a close, I wanted to look back on the structure of the capstone course itself; what worked, what didn’t, and what I think could be improved going forward.
Strengths
One of my biggest complaints about high school (and, to a certain extent, my first undergraduate degree) is that, for all that we had to learn, there was very little in the way of practical skills being taught. Sure, integrals are great, but how do I do my taxes?
In my opinion, that represents the biggest strength of this course: I felt like I learned skills that are directly applicable as I search for my first job. The project itself was great for this, as a sort of test run to working with an actual development team on an actual project for an actual grown-up job. What I think I enjoyed the most, though, were the explorations and extra credit assignments. Learning how to use ChatGPT and create a career map are skills that I think will be genuinely useful to me, and they’re things that I wouldn’t necessarily be taught anywhere else.
Weaknesses
That does segue into what I consider to be the biggest weakness of the course: it’s a lot of busy-work. Just working on the project itself, my team is already meeting twice a week and communicating consistently on Discord, in addition to doing the actual development. Keeping track of all the non-project related assignment deadlines on top of that quickly got overwhelming. Those extra credit assignments I mentioned? I actually didn’t end up submitting them for credit, because I mostly forgot they existed until after the deadline had passed.
Opportunities
Now, to be fair, it’s definitely my fault that I missed them; I’m certainly not winning any awards for time management here. That said, I still think there’s an opportunity to improve. I would recommend cutting down on the assignments that aren’t directly related to the project. Things like the progress reports, poster, etc. are fine; they’re directly related to the project, and so they sort of stay at the top of your mind. If this course is meant to emulate a job, they feel like part of that job. But assignments like the discussions and — dare I say it — the blog posts don’t feel particularly…purposeful, I suppose. Rather, it feels like work for the sake of work.
If anything, I think I’d prefer to see these assignments made extra credit, and some of the extra credit assignments as regular graded assignments. In my mind, they relate more to the purpose of this class overall as a kind of career development course.
Threats
Honestly, though, I didn’t see any issues that I would consider to be serious enough that it threatens the quality of the course. On the whole, I’m left feeling satisfied with both this class and the program as a whole, and I’m glad I got to be a part of it.
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