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Practical Software Engineering Capstone Course – Framework for Large, Open-Ended Projects to Graduate Student Teams

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Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2018)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1022))

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Abstract

For students, capstone project represents the culmination of their studies and is typically one of the last milestones before graduation. Participating in a capstone project can be an inspiring learning opportunity or a struggle due various reasons yet a very educative learning experience. During the IT capstone project students practice and develop their professional skills in designing and implementing a solution to a complex, ill-defined real-life problem as a team. This paper reflects on organizing IT capstone projects in computer science and software engineering Master programmes in a Sino-Finnish setup, where the projects are executed in a framework provided by a capstone project course. We describe the course framework and discuss the challenges in finding and providing ill-defined challenges with meaningful real-life connection for project topics. Based on our observations complemented with students’ feedback we also propose areas for future development.

This article is further work extending an earlier conference paper: Majanoja, A-M. and Vasankari, T. Reflections on Teaching Software Engineering Capstone Course. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2018) - Volume 2, pages 68-77.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Future Technologies, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Timo Vasankari & Anne-Maarit Majanoja

Authors
  1. Timo Vasankari
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  2. Anne-Maarit Majanoja
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anne-Maarit Majanoja .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Bruce M. McLaren

  2. MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Rob Reilly

  3. University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA

    Susan Zvacek

  4. University of Ulster, Newtownabbey, UK

    James Uhomoibhi

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Vasankari, T., Majanoja, AM. (2019). Practical Software Engineering Capstone Course – Framework for Large, Open-Ended Projects to Graduate Student Teams. In: McLaren, B., Reilly, R., Zvacek, S., Uhomoibhi, J. (eds) Computer Supported Education. CSEDU 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1022. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21151-6_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21151-6_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21150-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-21151-6

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