Capstone Design Courses
Note: This page was recently reorganized. If you notice
broken links or other problems, please email neelam AT cse.ohio-state.edu
1. Introduction
The CSE curriculum offers a rich variety of capstone design courses
that BS-CSE students can pick from, allowing them to choose one that
matches their specific technical interests; each student is required
to take one of these courses; students may also choose, as part of
their elective hours, additional courses from the list of capstone
design courses. While each of these courses specializes on a
particular domain such as animation or web services,
they also share certain key aspects. First, they are all designed to
prepare students for
engineering practice via a major
design experience based on the knowledge and skills acquired in
earlier course work and incorporating appropriate engineering
standards and multiple realistic constraints (which is part of
the EAC Criteria). Second, each of
these courses includes additional activities to contribute to
students' achievement of several of the
professional outcomes
such as lifelong learning.
Some time ago (Winter-Spring '10), and partly in the context of creating
semester-versions of these courses, the faculty involved with these
courses and
other interested faculty worked together to create a common set of
learning outcomes for these courses both in order to capture their
commonalities and to stress the importance of these aspects during
future revisions of these courses as well as in the design of any new
capstone design courses. Of course, each course also has an additional
set of domain-specific learning outcomes (that are listed in the
individual syllabuses).
Students in each CSE capstone design course will:
- Master synthesizing and applying prior knowledge to designing and
implementing solutions to open-ended computational problems while
considering multiple realistic constraints.
- Be competent in evaluating design alternatives.
- Be competent with software design and development practices and
standards.
- Be familiar with researching and evaluating computing tools and
practices for solving given problems.
- Be competent with deadline driven projects in a team setting.
- Be competent with issues of project management, such as teamwork,
project scheduling, individual and group time management.
- Be competent with presenting work to a group of peers.
- Be familiar with presenting work to a range of audiences.
- Be competent with techniques for effective written communication
for a range of purposes (user guides, design documentation,
storyboards etc.)
- Be familiar with analyzing professional issues, including
ethical, legal and security issues, related to computing projects.
The capstone design courses are designed in such a way as to enable
students to achieve these outcomes. In particular, each course:
- Builds on the knowledge and skills acquired in earlier course work.
Each course is at the senior level. Each includes, as prerequisites,
CSE 560,
the junior-level keystone project course that develops students'
design and implementation skills as well as their team working and
communication skills; CSE 601, the course on social, ethical and
professional issues that helps students' understanding of these
issues and further develops their communication skills; and other
appropriate technical courses (such as CSE 581 (Interactive Computer
Graphics) for CSE 682 (Computer Animation Project), or CSE 630 (Artificial
Intelligence I) for CSE 731 (Knowledge-based Systems Project)). (The
semester-versions of the capstone courses include the corresponding
semester courses among their prerequisites.)
- Is organized around a project that has a major design component that
requires student teams to explore various design alternatives accounting
for appropriate constraints such as performance (space and/or time),
platform restrictions, etc.; and that requires students teams to account
for maintainability issues, perhaps to accomodate changing requirements
or to function in a somewhat different environment.
- The project teams should account, where appropriate, for standards
such as XML, Ogre3D, UML etc., in arriving
at and describing their
designs.
- The project teams should take account, where appropriate, of
relevant ethical, social, and professional issues. Questions about such
issues as copyright, privacy, violence (for e.g., in the context of
computer games) etc. arise naturally in the capstone design projects.
- The teams are required to explore recent tools, systems, and practices
that are may be related to the project. Considering the pace of development
of the domains that the projects are based in, this requires students
to engage in considerable amount of independent as well as team-learning
of new ideas, helping hone their lifelong learning skills.
3. List of Capstone Design Courses
Currently (Fall '10), students have a choice of six designated
capstone design courses. For each course in the list below, clicking on
the link takes you to a page that provides an overview of the course.
Complete materials from recent offerings of each course is available
here (access restricted; contact
Neelam for information).
- CSE 682: Computer Animation Project
- CSE 731: Knowledge-Based Systems Project
- CSE 758: Software Engineering Project
- CSE 762: Web Services Project
- CSE 772: Information Systems Project
- CSE 786: Game Design and Development Project
(Another course, CSE 778, Computer-aided design and analysis of VLSI circuits project, that was designated as a capstone design project has been
discontinued because of limited student interest.)
An earlier version of this page is
here.