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Course Description

This is a seminar course in the Computer Science (CS) and Information Technology (IT) curriculum intended to provide students with the opportunity to develop their written and oral technical communication skills, while also applying knowledge from CS/IT courses towards a capstone project. The course is a core requirement for graduation for all Computer Science and Information Technology majors.

The course has three major components:

  1. A series of students-led Class Discussions. There are going to two types of class discussions:

    • Focusing on Assigned Articles

    • Focusing on everyone’s progress on Capstone Project

    • In addtion to classes, you are required to meet with me atleast once every two weeks to have a one-on-one discussion on your progress on the project. Please use this link to schedule a time or just drop by. Failure to do so would result in deduction of points from your attendance grade.

  2. A significant term-long Capstone Project that is completed by each individual student. As output of the project, each student will individually produce:

  3. Purposeful Pathways events that are designed to help students develop their professional skills. These events include workshops on resume writing, interviewing, and networking.

Course Goals

The goal of this course is to help students develop their ability to read, understand, present and produce technical articles related to Computer Science. The technical communication and comprehensions skills developed in this course will be invaluable in the student’s future careers in industry or academia.

Pioneering computer scientist Richard Hamming put it best in his book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:

You must master three things to “selling” new ideas:

  1. Giving formal presentations
  2. Producing written reports, and
  3. Mastering the art of informal presentations as they happen to occur.

All three are essential—you must learn to sell your ideas, not by propaganda, but by force of clear presentation. I am sorry to have to point this out; many scientists and others think good ideas will win out automatically and need not be carefully presented. They are wrong; many a good idea has had to be rediscovered because it was not well presented the first time, years before!