If you would like to submit an application proposal, please fill out this form. We are currently looking for suitable projects for this course!
The material covered in CS132 culminates in a final project, where students work in groups to implement a web application for a client over the course of the semester. Groups typically include four persons with a mixture of designers and programmers appropriate to the project. Projects start a week or two into the semester and continue throughout, with various milestones and reports. The bulk of the design of the project will be done by the end of March, with most of the project coding being done in April. Projects are due in early May.
An ideal project will have a specific goal or motivation: Why do you need this project done? Why should students share your passion? It will also have an idea of the target user or audience: Who will be using this website and why? Having an idea of the website’s technical requirements is helpful but not a requirement. The project should be both engaging and appropriately challenging for students.
As the project sponsor, you should be willing to meet with the team or a team representative (in person, over Skype, etc) at least biweekly to ensure the team is on track and to provide the necessary guidance and feedback. If you wish the project to be integrated with any existing systems, you should be able to provide any documentation needed.
We are especially looking to support projects for groups or individuals who might otherwise have difficulty getting a website that meets their needs due to constraints relating to accessibility, financial need, or the inclusion of underrepresented groups.
Please note: A website with static content is not a suitable project. Proposals must have a 'backend' component as well (please refer to the examples of past proposals below).
A good project proposal will:
- Briefly state the motivation/purpose.
- Describe typical users and common use case(s).
- Have a clear, bulleted list of minimum requirements.
- Include a rough overview of the technologies required/involved.
- Provide examples (if available).
- Be properly scoped, so as to allow a group of 4 students to do a good job on the project over the course of a semester.
- Will improve the lives of the designated users without being a detriment to the lives of others. Please consider the long term impact that your project may have on varying identities if it is successfully developed.
As examples, previous projects included:
- A front end to let spectators provide input regarding music volume and fire status for Waterfire.
- A web site for posting of free cultural events in NYC
- Mobile remote for Shelby.tv
- Food truck locator
- Music player for one or more business locations
- Textbook exchange web site
- Visualizer for Tracelytics
- Web shell for MongoDB
- Polling using text messaging via Twilio
More detailed examples can be found here and here. Well-done examples include proposals #14 and #18 from the first link and proposals #4, #17, #28, and #32 from the second link. Check them out!
Project submissions should be received before January 24th, 2021 to allow us time to review them and get back to you before they are distributed to the students. To submit a project proposal, fill out this form
Caveats
Project sponsor should note several things:
- Intellectual Property: Brown's policy is that students own any code they write for a course. Because the sponsor is offering assistance, guidance, and direction, our policy is that sponsors get full, non-exclusive rights to any product produced. Projects can also be specified up-front as open source.
- Obligations: We expect sponsors to provide the students with a well-defined project as well as project direction on a timely basis throughout the semester.
- Working Product: There is no guarentee that the students will conceive the perfect solution or even a workable product. They will be graded on their efforts and you will be asked to provide input into that grading process.
- Continuing Efforts: There is no guarentee of continued development beyond the end of the course by the students involved. If the sponsor wants access to the projects' documentation / code-base or they require the ability of a non-expert to edit, modify, or add content to the site, they should make this clear at the initial meetings with each group and in the project specification.
- Development Timing: Projects will be developed over the course of the semester. Much of the time in February and March will be spent on understanding requirements and designing the front end of the project. Most of the implementation will be done in April and the final demonstration (and sponsor-hand off) will be in early May. Sponsors should not expect a working prototype implementation earlier than mid-April. (Sample web pages and a non-functional prototype will probably be available in March.)
- Ethics Brown University Computer Science is committed to responsible and ethical computer science instruction. As such, project proposals which fulfill the above requirements but are deemed to pose insurmountable ethical problems will be deemed unsuitable at the instructors’ discretion.