Thoughts, Week 12

There's not too much to say about our Capstone proposal. There's only one new section (Executive Summary), and there's no new content involved. It's just a re-hashing of everything in our proposal so far, or at least the important stuff. We had to give a summary of the problem and solution, include some information about our resources and budget, talk about the dates on the Timeline for the most important things, and I added a bit about the Methodology (what I'm actually doing to complete this project).

Other than that, we've just been working on our Capstones. I think we'll have the rest of the semester to work on them, too. There's going to be a final presentation in early December where we talk about what we've done so far and why we should be allowed to go forward with our project. There was also the Proposal Defense earlier. Even in the Capstone class there's a lot of stuff to do other than Capstone. Heh, I guess that's why we need a portfolio system at CSUMB.

As for my project, I'd say it's going along well. I'm learning about Moodle, and about how to implement all of the things I'm going to need to implement. I hope to have access to the iLearn testing environment soon. Not much to say. Planning is on track.

Thoughts, Week 8

We've had the past two weeks to do two assignments: update our proposal (as usual), and actually start our ILP Portfolio. We were supposed to start it earlier this semester, but now it's actually due. Well, the first part of it anyway. That's a good thing because it means I took some time to flesh it out and make sure all the required content is there. And this way, I've got a head start on the rest of it, since I've got the design and format already done.

The ILP site updating was mostly uneventful. The core MLOs are listed on the ITCD site, and I still had evidence for just about everything. I didn't have as much for my math class (Math 170: Discrete Mathematics), and I showed evidence for Advanced C++ rather than regular C++. (I essentially assessed out of regular C++. I took a similar course at my old college and I convinced the professor that I shouldn't have to repeat the material.) It all works out though.

The two sections we added this time were the Milestones and Timeline. Creating Milestones was good because it forced me to break my tasks down into very small parts. Creating the Timeline after that was easy, it just involved figuring out how to tell Excel to do what I wanted it to do. Putting the Timeline into MS Word was the hardest part, actually. It's hard to make that much information fit on a single page in a visual format. I got it done though, and it still looks okay in my opinion.

Thoughts, Week 6

This week we added the Budget section and the Testing and Evaluation section to our proposals. I liked creating the budget. It wasn't too hard, since we had previous examples to use, and it was fun to see how much a project like this would really cost. It makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something, or at least that I'm going to be.

The budget section still feels a bit short, even though I added in more resources as our instructor suggested. I hadn't thought of things like a computer to use Adobe Dreamweaver, or a testing server. As I found out when I presented, we will have testing servers available to us. It's amazing how many resources students have access to. We can use all the Adobe software for free in the labs, and some labs even have top-end programs like Maya. That costs thousands of dollars usually, but it's all provided by the school. I think CSUMB gets some good deals on it too, but still.

I took some time to add section headers to the early sections of my proposal, and it looks a bit better now, I think. I still haven't done the research I need to about other projects. I should've found time by now, but between work for my other classes and time at my Service Learning site, I haven't.

Thoughts, Week 5

This week was easier than past weeks in some ways, and harder in others. This week I will be presenting my proposed Capstone to the programming teachers. There was no work to do on our Capstone Proposal paper, but I used the time to prepare for the presentation.

It seems a bit unbalanced for the people that presented last week - they had last week's work to do on top of preparing to present.

I think my presentation is strong. I've got all the parts I should have, and a few others just in case. I've got a slide I plan to skip over unless it's asked about. It never hurts to be prepared, right? I've gone through the presentation a few times. I always don't do well when rehearsing, but when I'm presenting I pull it off decently well, I think.

I don't have many pictures in my presentation. I guess I should add a few, but I'm not sure what would be good. A picture of iLearn? Everybody that's going to be there knows what iLearn looks like. Ah well. I've got the information, and that should be good enough.

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.