One-Semester CS Capstone: A 40-60 Teaching Approach

The CS capstone (senior project) course has two primary goals: academic and practical. The academic goal is to integrate knowledge and skills developed in other courses in the context of a real-world project, while the practical goal is to carryout software development in a simulated real-world development environment. A one-semester capstone course presents a challenge to achieving these goals in such short time. This paper describes a 40-60 Teaching Approach that utilizes 40% of the course time for achieving the academic goal and the remaining 60% for achieving the practical goal. The first part focuses on the exploration, planning, design, and document generation, while the second part is dedicated for working with tools and technologies. The presented approach is the result of the author´s experience in teaching and fine-tuning the capstone course since spring 2004.