Computing capstone projects and the role of failure in education

We held our end of semester capstone project presentations just the other day. Always an interesting experience, for students, audience and for me in particular as coordinator of our capstone project experience. Our Bachelor of Computer & Information Sciences degree has broadened recently to include several new majors. So now in addition to our traditional software development majors, we have seen a variety of project presentations from students majoring in IT Security, Information Services, Net Centric-computing and a student studying a conjoint degree majoring in accounting and software development. Several teams had a combination of students from these different majors. This of course raises challenges for us in sourcing, coordination and assigning of projects, as well as for supervisors in overseeing the more multi-disciplinary model of learning that these projects bring forth.