Scaffolding Student Work in Capstone Design Courses

This paper focuses on approaches to supporting and organizing student work for a capstone sequence shared by several computing degrees. These courses focus on software product creation from requirements specification through prototype product development. In these degree programs, students begin the capstone courses with good relevant knowledge, but often struggle with integrating and applying what they know. This paper discusses several approaches that help to address this problem. The approaches include templates for work products, iterative development, interim deliverables with fixed schedule deadlines, project tracking, and examples for key work products. This paper presents observations based on student success with various aspects of the projects. The discussion provides a summary of problems and advantages to the techniques used in the courses