Thoughts, Week 4

Whew, this week was a lot of work! We had to add the usual two new sections to our Capstone Proposal - Deliverables and Methodology - and we had to create a powerpoint for the Capstone Defense. The Deliverables section was about what we would actually produce - always good to document. I already had a good idea of the elements that would be needed because I did a similar (though much smaller) project for my PHP class (CST 352), but I wanted to be very specific about how the functionality would be divided into different pages. This was also the section to talk about documentation, which isn't a big element of my Capstone, I think. Documentation is obviously important, especially when implementing a new system, but in my case it's built on an already-known system and its functionality isn't especially strange.

Methodology was a lot more specific, and I don't think I have as much content there as I should. I've only got two resources listed, but I'm sure there are more that I'm just not thinking of. I'll probably discover more as I start to work on my project too. There are probably other risks as well. In general, I'm fairly sure I need to expand this section more.

The big thing that took up my time this week was creating the powerpoint. The content was fairly easy to come up with because I was just restating what was in my Capstone Proposal. But a presentation is a lot different than a paper, and working out how to communicate my ideas clearly and succinctly, and still take up 6-8 minutes was a challenge. I need to rehearse my presentation more, and maybe I'll change a few things around a little bit, but I think the structure is fairly well laid out. I'm just glad I'm presenting next week because it means I get another week to rehearse.

I still haven't completed a few things I missed on the previous sections. The main thing is that I haven't adequately researched and documented other similar projects. I know of a few, but I haven't put in the time to write about them. I hope I have time to do that in the coming week, because I didn't this week.

Thoughts, Week 3

This week was all about refining our Capstone proposal. It is now structured, and each section has clearly defined requirements. This makes it much easier to write. I'm glad we started out informally, it makes this feel like a big step. I guess it's partly because our proposal now has a title page and a table of contents (even if there are only two things listed so far).

Now that we've got requirements on each section, I know how to separate my ideas, and what to put in each section. Because of this, my proposal feels more like a proposal now. I had some areas I really needed to expand on. I still do, I guess, but I know what kinds of things should go there. Specifically, I feel like my problem statement needs work. I did a fairly good job of not talking about the solution (have you ever tried it? It's hard - I want to dive into the answer and stop talking about the problem), but that part is a bit empty compared to my solution description. Then again, in addition to general requirements, the solution description is the area to talk about how the solution fulfills the 5 required elements of a Capstone. I guess it makes sense that the solution section is bigger than the problem section, but it still makes the problem section feel smaller by comparison.

I also had to get my advisor contact form signed and scanned, but that wasn't a big deal.

Thoughts, Week 2

This week, web site modification was easy for me. I had to add a paragraph describing my Capstone idea, which was easy once I'd selected an idea and written the 200 more words describing it. I was basically summarizing from a larger document. I also changed the formatting of the assignments a little bit. I'm using my website template from my Web Design class, which has cool stuff like CSS dropdown menus. In that class, I had to talk a bit about each assignment, so each one needed its own page. In this class, the files are self-descriptive, so without a page describing each assignment, I needed to revise the structure of my links.

That's just esoteric stuff though, not what this class is about. Our main goal this week was to select one of our two ideas from last week. I had to think about it a lot. I've had some good times with Tarsier, and I can tell that they're a good group of people, and a good project to be involved with. Still, they're more science-oriented than I am, and the iLearn portfolio system is closer to what I see myself doing once I finish college. I ended up going with that (the iLearn portfolio system, that is).

The other thing we had to do this week was find and talk to a Capstone adviser. My concentration is programming, both of my potential Capstones are mainly about programming, there's only one pure programming teacher at CSUMB, I've taken many classes from him and know him well, and we've been working together this semester for a different class (independent study). Suffice to say, this part wasn't a problem. I didn't even look at this part of the assignment until today, which turned out to be my downfall - we have to get our potential adviser to sign a piece of paper saying we really did talk to them. Oh well, we meet Mondays for the independent study, so I'll do it then.

Thoughts, Week 1

The thing that surprised me most this week was how easy it was to get ideas for a Capstone project. I didn't know we'd have to come up with ideas so quickly, and I didn't have any planned, but I was able to talk to a few people and find ideas that just needed a chance to happen. I knew Tarsier* would be an option, but Eric Tao talked about an iLearn Portfolio, and it sounds like an interesting idea for a Capstone. A background with Tarsier won't help me out in the world, but a background with iLearn definitely might. Lots of people have heard of Moodle/iLearn. On the other hand, Tarsier is a full-featured modeling program, though it's only used by a small group.

Thankfully we can put down two ideas and narrow it down to one by next week, so I can spend a few days thinking of pros and cons for both sides.


* Tarsier is a 3D modeling program used by a few individuals in the Science department. I worked with them a little bit last semester.