As the term wraps, and therefore my time as an OSU student, I find myself reflecting on the unique experience of Capstone and what I’ve learned throughout it. My group has been working on an Escape Room game built with Unity. Having never worked with Unity, there were of course many breakthroughs with using this game engine and using C# for the first time. However, the biggest learning experience came from collaboration. We instituted code reviews from Week 1, which was certainly the right thing to do, but also added challenges and opportunities for learning. How do you go about requesting changes to code which works, but looks messy, without feelings coming into the picture (especially when working with friends you’ve worked with before)? This situation has certainly been dealt with by every professional developer, but still presented a great learning experience and opportunity for growth. After getting our bearings with this project and having some material to work with, PRs and code reviews began to take on a standard procedure and ultimately became very mechanical. This was great, as it allowed reviews to be done very matter-of-factly, as a certain standard had already been established, and personal feelings not really coming into the picutre.
Without a doubt, the biggest strength to this course has been the freedom and flexibility. It probably varies between teams and projects, but just being let loose to accomplish our goal as we saw fit was a great feelings. Being treated as competent adult developers was extremely refreshing.
As with basically all courses as part of the postbacc CS program at OSU, the biggest weakness is the lack of feedback. None of our progress reports have yielded any meaningful comments. We could be totally off track and not even know it. Sure, we could reach out for help if needed and I’m confident it would be there, but the ratio of cost to interaction is extremely poor.
This weakness is the biggest opportunity. Basically any engagement from faculty without our progress reports would be a huge improvement. It would be great to see if some feature was especially exciting to see, or if it seemed that another feature would likely cause problems down the road. Anything.
The main threat I see to this course is how quickly the field is changing. This is probably the most up to date course I’ve taken in the whole program, as shown by all the AI related assignments, but the threat persists. Because projects are so open, this class probably can adapt faster than most other courses, but it still will likely be a problem in the future.
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