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Capstone courses

Computer science majors must take at least one course from an approved list of capstone courses. This ensures that students have at least one course that synthesizes and integrates skills and knowledge acquired throughout the computer science undergraduate curriculum, and which includes a significant design experience, where teamwork and written and oral communication are a key part of the experience.

Characteristics of a capstone course

Although the various 4000-level courses designated as capstone courses focus on different problem domains and may be organized differently, all capstone courses are distinguished by the following characteristics:

  • Requires synthesis and integration of knowledge and skills acquired across the curriculum to solve a significant open-ended problem.
  • Provides a significant design experience in developing a solution, including the examination of multiple design alternatives, with justification for the final path taken.
  • Uses teamwork.
  • Requires significant written, oral and visual deliverables, including a summative report and presentation. 
  • Includes multiple reflection activities, perhaps repeated periodically, e.g., individual reflective writing assignments, design or code reviews, group or individual peer reviews.
  • Includes an evaluation or assessment activity to gauge the merit the solution.  

Approved CS Capstone Courses

  • CS 4284: Systems & Networking Capstone
  • CS 4274: Secure Computing Capstone
  • CS 4414: Issues in Scientific Computing (when taught by CS faculty)
  • CS 4624: Multimedia, Hypertext & Information Access
  • CS 4634: Design of Information
  • CS 4644: Creative Computing Studio
  • CS 4664: Data-Centric Computing Capstone
  • CS 4704: Software Engineering Capstone
  • CS 4784: Human-Computer Interaction Capstone
  • CS 4884: Computational Biology & Bioinformatics Capstone

In addition, individual CS 4994 Undergraduate Research projects where the supervising faculty member ensures the characteristics of a capstone course listed above are present (including working on a team, examining multiple design alternatives, providing significant written, oral and visual deliverables, evaluating or assessing merit of the solution, etc.) may be counted for capstone credit with prior approval from the associate department head.

For such CS 4994 projects, the supervising faculty member should include a request for capstone credit with an explanation of how capstone characteristics are achieved in the project proposal.