Capstone registration is now open. You need to fill out the catalyst survey to apply, most students receive their 1st or 2nd choice. You should be through most, if not all of your 300’s in addition to having significant project experience before tackling a capstone. These courses are supposed to “cap” your experience here in CSE. You’ll find more detailed descriptions/prereqs below. If courses do not fill with pre-registration, open space will be released first come first served during sophomore registration each quarter. http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/ugrad/current/Capstone.htm
2009-2010 Capstones
Autumn 2009: 454 Advanced Internet Systems -Weld
Prerequisites: 326 and significant project experience
In the past decade the Internet has gone from a rarity to an essential tool for work and play. Search engines, ecommerce platforms and computational advertising have grown in economic and social importance. This class will explain the fundamental computational principles and datamining algorithms behind these services and others, providing background for a large projects. Students will work in groups of four to build an end-to-end Web system. Each team will end with a formal oral presentation of the tool constructed. Written reports are also manditory and should include both a description of the design choices made as well as the results of experiments designed to confirm their effectiveness.
Winter 2010: Accessibility Capstone – Ladner
Prereq: 326, 303 and project experience
As cell phones become more capable with connectivity with the internet and sensors such as cameras, compasses, GPS, and accelerometers, there are opportunities to use them as accessibility or assistive devices. In this capstone, students will work in teams to create new applications on cell phones that allow persons with disabilities to accomplish tasks that would be difficult to impossible to do without the applications. An example would be an application for a blind person that would take a picture of a bar code on a product, decode it, look it up on the internet, then speak the name of the product. There will be brainstorming sessions with practitioners in the assistive technology industry and with users to help students develop viable concepts for applications. Teams will then implement and test their concepts as working applications. Teams will prepare written reports on their applications and present their applications in a public poster session where persons with disabilities will be invited.
Spring 2010: Operating Systems Capstone – Kimura
Prereq: CSE 451
The students in the OS Capstone will work on a small team project of their own design and choosing, but within the overarching guidelines of being operating system specific. The students have access to the windows operating system sources for their projects. The projects typically look at adding new features to the OS, or *fixing* the behavior of the OS. As much as possible the projects mirror what is happening in the industry, including using the same development tools and adhering to the same standards.
Spring 2010: 477 Hardware Capstone – Patel
Prereq: Hardware track students: 466 and 467
Prereq: Software track students: 466
The plan for 477 next year is not to have it focused on just “Technology for Low-Income Regions,” but be more general than that. The students will be allowed to explore different options and so the themes can be diverse across the teams.
Projects will involve hardware design, software design, embedded devices, web applications, sensor integration, and combinations of these. Example application themes include health care, sustainability, activity sensing, low-power and power harvesting techniques, and novel interaction techniques.
Spring 2010: Games Capstone – Popovic
Prerequisites: CSE 326; CSE 341; CSE 378 and substantial programming experience, such as in CSE 451 or 457.
This capstone course will focus on the emerging process of designing, developing and evaluating interactive games. As the game industry eclipses film and music industry in revenue, the days of developing a game by a single developer are long over. An ad-hoc approach to game design and development of the past is replaced by a well structured process, where the creativity, development prowess, artistic expression, and the skill to assess user experience all meet together to produce a compelling interactive experience.
In this course, you will learn how to iterate over the game design long before the game is developed, how to work in small teams with people who are each experts in different domains, and most importantly how to develop a game that will enable iterative refinement of the experience that will elevate your game from the realm of countless games that are abandoned in the first 30 seconds, into a realm of an addictive experience that cannot be put down.
The teams will have the choice of developing for the Flash, XNA or Iphone platforms, and choosing between several game genres including casual games, educational game, and massively-multiplayer games.
The course is open to both CSE majors and those outside of CSE. For CSE majors, please write a short description about your substantial programming experience, and describe significant exposure to at least one of the following: game development, computer graphics, human computer interaction, networking or operating systems.
