Capstone Project Wiki

Here we outline our expectations for the time you will spend with the students as a coach and reviewer. The amount of time required will be variable, depending on the progress of your team, your project, and the needs of the individuals on your team. Consequently, the general time expectation is as follows:

• Capstone’s expectation is that you spend approximately 6 hours per week as a coach:
  • 1 hour meeting with the team
  • 0.5 hours (average) in pod lectures
  • 1 hour (average) reviewing your own team’s submissions
  • 1 hour (average) evaluating other teams’ submissions
  • 0.5 hours working with the sponsor
  • 2 hours guiding and mentoring students

We recognize that you have other responsibilities that will occasionally interfere with your expected participation, but we hope these are infrequent. Please let your pod instructor know in advance when there is a problem with reviews as we can reschedule these. (Pod lectures and coach training meetings are on fixed schedules and will be announced well in advance for the entire semester.) Coach responsibilities are divided into a week, month, and stage basis:

Weekly Obligations

• Capstone activities take place between 8 am and 9:50 on weekdays. This is when you will be doing most of your student interaction, including team meetings and pod lectures.
• You should plan on meeting with your team at least once a week in a formal team meeting. We encourage your team to set up a schedule. Share this with your instructor so he/she can also attend periodically.
• After the first week of Fall semester, hour-long pod lectures are held once per week on a fixed day of the week, six or seven times each semester. For more information on the first week see Getting Started. You are expected to attend and participate with your team.

Monthly Obligations

• We have monthly coach training meetings.

Obligations Per Stage

• During the first week of class you and your team will meet for the first time, start team building, learn about your project, develop initial project documents and an overall schedule, and learn about the key steps of design. We hope you can meet with your team multiple times during this initial time . At least one of these meetings should be in-person on campus.
• We provide $10 per student on the team for you and your team to have a special team-building activity early in the fall semester. We expect you to help plan and attend this activity. For more information on the team building acivity see Mentoring in Team Dynamic
• When the team is working on hardware, in-person on-site contact with the coach is invaluable. During hardware-intensive periods, you may need to be in the lab at least weekly.
• You should plan on meeting individually with team members several times each semester to discuss individual contributions. These meetings benefit from personal interaction, but this is not required. At the middle and end of each semester you will be asked to assess (grade) the individual contributions of each student on your team using a rubric spreadsheet we will provide.
• As a coach you will help review and evaluate the work of two other teams. This will require:
  • reading their design stage packages,
  • providing written feedback and a grade based on a grading rubric we will provide, and
  • participating in a live review session lasting 25-50 mins.
    There are three reviews for each team each semester. We will try to schedule those at convenient days for the coaches involved during capstone time. Note: you will only be grading other team’s work at these reviews, not your own team’s.

The table below summarizes the expected time requirements.