Senior Design Seminar Syllabus

This course is the culminating experience of a computer science students studies here at Bridgewater. It will pull together the fundamental elements of the disciple from other courses to demonstrate to the students how they work together in practice. This course will also expose students to some cutting edge aspects of computer science while requiring them to think and write critically about the effects that our discipline can have on individuals and society. Students will design and implement a part of a large group programming project as part of this course.

Course Outcomes:

By the end of the course each student:

• Satisfactorily programs a large project from an informal needs statement

• Accurately describes the merits and possible unintended consequences of a computational system, service or proposal

• Demonstrate knowledge of different licensing options, and the protections and limitations of various intellectual property laws

• Writes a specification document well (writes for cs audience)

• Identifies disruptive effects of latest computing advancements on individuals, organizations, and society

• Justifies the choice of an appropriate computing solution for a problem based on the specific context

• Can articulate differences/tradeoffs of multiple designs

• Works together as part of a team.

Project Work:

Non-Project work:

Students with special needs:

Anyone who has special needs should contact me in the first week of classes so that reasonable accommodations can be agreed on.

Academic Integrity:

See http://catalog.bridgew.edu/content.php?catoid=8&navoid=632#Academic_Integrity_and_Classroom_Conduct for a complete description of the academic integrity procedure at Bridgewater.

Academic integrity will be taken very seriously in this class. All individual work must be your own. If you cheat or otherwise represent the work of others as your own. You will receive an F for the course.

Guidelines for proper academic integrity:

Discussing problems with your classmates can help you understand the problems and kinds of solutions to those problems that you will learn about in this class. In an effort to make in clear what sort of discussions are appropriate and encouraged in this class and which cross the line to academic dishonesty I use the following guidelines: You may discuss any out of class problem I assign in this class with your classmates or other so long as no one is using any sort of recording implement including, but not limited to, computers, pdas, pens, pencils, phones etc. This lets you talk about theoretical solutions without sharing the actual implementations. As soon as anyone in the group is typing, writing etc, all conversations must stop. You may look at someone else's program code only very briefly in order to spot a simple syntax error. As a rule of thumb, if you find yourself looking at someone else's code for more than about 30-45 seconds it is probably time to stop. If you are having trouble with your program, come to the instructors office hours for more help.

All in class exams and quizzes are closed book and closed neighbor. If you are found using a data storage device of any kind during one of these evaluations, you will be failed for the course.

Of course for your group work, your entire group is intended to produce a single deliverable and are expected to work together on all parts of that so the above does not apply to members of a group working together on their group work.

Standards for in class behavior:

You are all adults and are expected to act as adults in this class. While questions are encouraged in this class, if a particular line of questioning is taking us too far afield, I will ask the student to come by my office hours or to see me after class.

Cell phones, pagers, electronic organizers and other devises should be silenced while in class. If you work of EMS or something similar, please turn your cell phones/ pagers etc to vibrate mode so that you are not disrupting others in the class.

In the unlikely case of trouble makers in the class, those who are simply attempting to disrupt the class will be asked to stop; those who will not, will be referred to the college for appropriate action.