2022 Computer Science Capstone Course Update

It’s been far too long since I’ve updated this blog and now I’ve got a backlog of topics to share. Since April, I taught another semester of UW-Madison’s Computer Science Capstone, published my first piece in an anthology, now lead both Product and Engineering at Singlewire Software, got married, and went to Ireland in October and New Zealand in January for our honeymoon! Let’s start with an update on the UW-Madison Computer Science Capstone course that I developed and teach.

The Computer Science Capstone in its Third Year

2022 marked our third year running the course and we scaled it significantly this year. This fall, 93 students and 6 corporate partners participated. If you’re unfamiliar with the course, please check-out my earlier post here. In a nutshell, we work with corporate partners who sponsor the class, come up with a project for the students, and mentor them throughout the semester. I layer on lectures about how to collaborate, covering topics from lean start-up to scrum. One of my main goals is to get these students as much “real world” knowledge as I can before they graduate. So, I also bring in a variety of guest lecturers each semester who cover topics like Product Management (Eric Steege, Amazon), DevOps (Sara Willett, Master Card) and Kanban (Chad Beier & Jeff Bubolz, Wisconsin Agility).

There was a lovely article written about the class this semester by Emma Goshin. It’s worth checking out here. Last year’s article about our 2021 course is worth your time too. In that article, you can read about students’ individual experiences and projects, as well as the broader premise of the course.

Our 2022 Partners

This past year, we had a full slate of amazing partners for the class:

1. Amazon / Shopbop – Participating for the second year in a row. Students were asked to apply game theory to develop a web app helping shoppers build amazing outfits.
2. Associated Bank – Students used machine learning to produce an efficient algorithm for one of the bank’s important marketing initiatives.
3. Capital One – Back for their third year. Students built a rewards optimizer for card holders. One of our former students from the inaugural 2020 class came back as a mentor for Capital One this semester. Something I’d like to see much more of in the future.
4. Epic – Back for their third year as well. Students built a suite of health tools helping underserved populations get better care. One of our mentors from Epic has now been with us all three semesters!
5. Last Lock – A wonderful crew to work with, Last Lock is a smart lock start-up born out of the UW system. They’re back for their second year, after having hired five engineers full-time who worked on their project in 2021 (two of which came back as mentors). They did a ground-breaking, but secret project evaluating the viability of new technology for their smart locks. Both semesters involved hardware elements as well as software.
6. MCANTA – New to the class this year, MCANTA is a small team that automates testing, processes, and data migration for other companies. They did a business-oriented project, developing an algorithm to prove the value of automation for clients.

Scaling The Class

The biggest change this semester was the number of students. We scaled from 36 last year to 93 in 2022. To meet this growing need, we tried out larger teams of 6-12 students and had three students come back from 2021 to serve as Peer Mentors. On a corporate agile team, this team size is just about right, but in an academic setting, we found these teams were far too large. Students’ schedules are packed with classes, work, and fun leaving almost no time to coordinate with large teams throughout the week. To their credit, all of our teams iterated, adjusted and figured out how to work with larger teams. Some students even sited the experience on a large team as the most important thing they learned this semester.

What was your favorite part of the class?

Being able to work on a large team on project we chose – this is rare in college classes.

Finally getting to learn some industry practices. Prior courses did not prepare me very well for my past internship. This course helped me fill those gaps with experience working in teams, using AGILE, scrum, large repo managment, and so much more. I only wish I was able to take this course before the summer between Junior and Senior year(internships) of undergrad.

-2022 Students, CS639 Computer Science Capstone

In the future, we’ll be capping teams at 4-5 students and partnering with more organizations.

Computer Science Capstone Future Plans

We are currently accepting partners for the Fall 2023 Capstone course. We’re looking for corporate, non-profit, and government partners. If you are interested in learning more about this awesome partnership, please contact me or Justin Hines, our Director of Corporate Relations.

We’re also planning to expand the course to the spring semester and more than double the number of students participating during the 2023-2024 school year.

I can’t say enough about how much of a win-win this program is for the students and partners. Partners end up getting unprecedented access to some of our brightest students and many have hired engineers directly from the class. Students get so much out of that project work with their partners, understanding the constructs we use in the corporate world, and working with their fellow students on an important, real-world project. I’m looking forward to a very impactful 2023-2024!