My biggest success in this course was two-fold. One was further improving on team-based project work that concurrently required careful coordination and active communication with industry sponsors. Our team’s project involved transitioning an existing EMS/Fire services visualization C++-based Windows app to a web app. Since our team had to develop the program from scratch, the planning stage for the project itself and the server API structure required and still requires coordination and communication among all involved parties. Such an environment allowed me to hone my interpersonal skills, sometimes supporting teammates, other times stepping up to difficulties, and sometimes actively proposing new features and ideas, and other times learning from other team members and sponsors. Afterall, most things in software development cannot be done alone and the name of the game is teamplay. My experience throughout the project emphasized this point again while allowing me to hone the skill every day.
Another was technical skills, especially in React. As I volunteered to spearhead the development of all map-related components that would require multiple sub-components to be implemented, I learned a lot about React, from general structuring of multi-layered components to more technical uses of various React features (e.g. best use cases for contexts instead of props or when to use HOCs) to specific APIs (Mapbox and various GeoJson sourced layering). Actively developing and improving map-related components led me to explore React much further than all other web-related classes I took combined, and I can say with confidence that my React knowledge has increased tenfold compared to a few months ago.
Here is also my short SWOT analysis of OSU’s capstone program.
Strength: The projects that connect students with industry partners are valuable. This provides students with a learning experience that is quite different from the traditional student-professor relationship that is typical. Academia thought and industrial thought are often different, and the latter tends to be more pertinent to most of the class, which is students preparing to enter industry.
Weaknesses / Opportunities: The non-project related part of the course is a bit lackluster. I get that the main focus is the project. I think the other part is packaged as somewhat optional content, but I wish there was more content to consume. The discussions posts and blog posts take minimal work, but if there was more content for the overachieving students who wish to take more from the class, it would be great. Maybe a running list of entry-level technical question answers (e.g. week 1 has a few articles about OOP, week 2 about how compilers work, week 3 about signed vs unsigned and IEEE754, etc.) could provide for some good content that is easy to conjure up for the staff.
Threats: None really.
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