Designing and Developing an Informatics Capstone Project Course

Informatics is the study of the application of information technology. The focus of studies within an Informatics program is on particular problem domain areas, including scientific domains like biology or chemistry, but also non-scientific domains like music, fine arts, or business. In this paper we describe our experience with the development of a capstone course for undergraduate Informatics students. In particular, we focus on process-related activities we have undertaken to deal with the rapid increase in enrollment for our course, which has grown from 15 students during the 2001/2002 academic year to more than 100 students currently enrolled. During the first 4 years that we have offered the course, over 300 students have completed more than 80 capstone group projects, with an expected 30 more projects this year. We present profiles of our past projects to illustrate the diversity and challenges to be expected of an Informatics program, which is significantly different than a traditional Computer Science program