A capstone design course is a senior-level course designed to enable students to bring together much of what they have learned in their undergraduate major and apply it to the design, construction, and documentation of a sizable and useful engineering artifact. In the Computer Engineering curriculum, CSE477 fills this role for students in the hardware track. The way it accomplishes this is through a course project that ties together material previously encountered in the program. The project experience has several elements, including:
Date | Milestone | Description |
8 April |
Form groups, suggest projects |
Form teams and meet to discuss project ideas. Generate
initial project
ideas. Turn in group rationale and 3
project ideas. |
15 April |
Prepare project proposal |
Generate a complete project proposal that includes all the elements specified. Each group will be provided with a web server directory in which to store all project documentation. Begin organizing all your materials in this directory. All should be web browser accessible. |
27 April |
Update 1 |
First project update web pages include a description of the major issues and unknowns in your project and the experiments that will be run to resolve them. |
18 May |
Update 2, first draft of product brochure | Second project update outlines how the issues raised in the first project update were resolved and what changes, if any, were necessary in the scope of the project. A first draft of a project brochure should accompany update 2. |
1 June |
First draft of final paper |
You will write your final report in the form of a paper to be
submitted to the Workshop on
Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA) 2004.
Follow the format provided. Here is an example paper. |
10 June |
Final paper, documentation, product brochure, and demo |
Final paper and technical
documentation completed.
Product brochure finished. Demo in 003E. Each team member
should be prepared
to answer any questions on any part of the implementation. The group web pages should be complete and include all elements of documentation (from initial proposal, through presentations and updates, to final paper and brochure). Use only .doc, .pdf, .jpeg, .gif, or .html files. |
Always update the project status page by appending a sentence or two to the top of the page (latest near the top) whenever you complete some work. Due this religiously so that we can easily monitor your progress. | ||
In addition to written documentation, each
student will
also be responsible for an in-class
design presentation. The first person to present in each
group will present the project
concept and general approach. The
second person will present what was accomplished,
what the demo is
likely to be like, and what there is left to do. Use lots of
figures and pictures to convey the key ideas. |