I think that my biggest successes in this course come in two forms, one technical and the other personal. On the technical side, I feel that I have made a lot of progress in bettering my understanding of machine learning and the intricacies of building a neural network. I gained experience with Tensorflow, which is something I would not have had without this project. On the personal side, this is the first time I have worked on a project with multiple other people for longer than a couple of weeks, and I feel like i have learned a lot about working in a team. From the initial development and idea stages, to the actual coding stages, and finally to where we are right now, which is finalizing our project, it has felt like I have gained so much experience in being part of a group working to create something functional and useful. The combination of these two successes is something I am grateful for, as I feel that both will help me grow both personally and professionally.
As far as analyzing the capstone course as a whole, I think that a lot of its strengths lie in amount of control students have over their projects development and how they wish to structure their processes. In comparison to other courses in the program, the capstone allows for a level of freedom that, at least personally, feels like it encourages students to actively participate in each step of their projects growth. With that being said, I feel that there is some oppurtunity for more group related assignments that could be helpful for each teams projects. For example, while the bi-weekly discussion boards are interesting, they feel disconnected from the projects themselves. I feel that it could be helpful to have more assignments besides the project reports and finals that are geared towards the projects themselves.
In terms of weaknesses and threats, the main one I can think of (which may not be currently solvable) is simply the amount of time given to complete the project. In the grand scope of things, a single quarter is not a lot of time to get to know a group of people, formulate a plan for completing a project, and then fully complete said project. It feels like we could have gone further with the project given more time, and while that is technically possible to do once the course is over, it becomes much more difficult when there isn’t time specifically dedicated to that purpose. With that being said, having the entire quarter is better than having only a part of it, and I still feel as though the capstone is a valuable learning experience.
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