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.