My biggest breakthrough in Capstone was appreciating the importance of collaborative work in tackling a difficult problem. For much of my computer science degree I have hacked away at problems alone and that has served me well. I discovered that I can feel really humbled and learn a great deal by paying attention to the progress of others and how they solve problems or approach troubleshooting. I learned a lot about Space Invaders-more than I knew before-and the Intel 8080. I didn’t feel a great breakthrough in my understanding of computer science fundamentals per se, but I did feel a breakthrough in my understanding of the industry as a whole and how processor technology has progressed through these different stages to become better and programmers have used smart techniques to optimize on the hardware this entire time. My biggest takeaway was just feeling the force of collaborative work and how the special synergistic effect of group problem-solving can lead to rapid progress. As for a SWOT analysis, I’ll begin with strengths. The biggest strength of this course is the group aspect of it, which can also be a weakness (bad group). But this design is the biggest strength. A weakness is that sometimes students can be selected into projects that they might not feel great about. I struggled a lot to understand material for my project and I felt out of my element consistently, which some view as a strength as well. I think another weakness that I perceived is that sometimes a work schedule + commute + kids makes time extremely limited during the week and so other group members could often times make progress when I was blocked by external factors. This scheduling aspect to the course can be challenging to coordinate depending on the composition of a team and I felt like I spent a lot of time trying to catch up on work that happened during the day. I think the main opportunities for this course lie in the project choices. As far as threats to the course, I don’t see any main threats.
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