Adapting waterfall design to an eight-month capstone course
Bibliographic record
Abstract
York University’s multi-disciplinary capstone design class was established “to include significant elements of design and implementation” in such as manner as to “resemble engineering projects in practice.” The class was restructured in summer 2016 to coincide with the introduction of fourth-year cohorts in both the Electrical and Mechanical programs. The changes were designed to more closely emulate an industry-standard approach. Choosing an industrially-accepted design methodology would provide a good framework for the project design and implementation and would be motivational to the students as they transitioned from university to professional life. In parallel, the course directors used a narrative structure, the Hero’s journey, to help students identify their pathways through capstone and to tell their capstone stories after the experience.We adapted the gating reviews for the Waterfall model often used in large government contracts. At the start of the project, students are provided a governing document (similar to a contract). Gate reviews are held at preliminary and critical design stages, test readiness and post-test review and final delivery. Every deliverable requires team reflection, similar to bidder self-evaluations on government contracts. The project concludes with an open house, similar to a product release, for students to present their projects and processes to stakeholders and the general public.This paper presents the results of the first two years of the newly revised capstone, using the Hero’s Journey metaphor and the waterfall model.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".