2:00pm-3:15pm

The plan is to use class meetings in the early part of the semester for project organization and in the late part of the semester for presentations.  There will also be some scheduled lectures/presentations, and there will also be a required poster presentation during a special seminar during the second half of the semester.

It is up to each student to monitor the posted class schedule, available via our class web site, and to attend meetings when required.

• Attend scheduled course and project meetings
• Create/support a project web page
• Track and report on all project work
• Submit project documentation.  For software development projects may include:
• Initial Design Document
• Software Requirements Specification (SRS)
• Prototype
• Test Plan and Results
• User's Guide
• Source code
• Executable package
• Project postmortem
• Other design and documentation
• Research report (for research project option)
• Project poster presentation during a special seminar (after midterm point of semester)
• Project final presentations, to the class and invited guests

In this class you will draw on every ounce of knowledge and experience you have gained in your studies of computer science (and everything else, too), to come up with a new or innovative software product, convince me that it is worth doing, and then do it.  If you're lucky, you may even come up with the "next big idea" or "killer app"!

The footsteps you will follow are those of trail blazing and entrepreneurial students like Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak (college student founders of Apple Computers), David Filo and Jerry Yang (students who created Yahoo), Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina (students who created Mosaic browser that became Netscape), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (student creators of Google), and many others.  The common theme among all of these are that they are bright students who believed in their ideas, and through dedication and hard work.

Note that the above names are all men.  In past years, women were not encouraged to pursue technical careers, and so they are underrepresented in the world of software innovation.  This is changing as more women pioneers enter computer science are related fields, but there are still hurdles to overcome.  The good news is that computer science has always valued new and creative ideas, and all of the students in this class, women and men alike, possess all of the talents and skills necessary to be leaders and innovators in this highly technical and very rewarding field.

Or not.

At the very least, you'll have a tangible result you can point to that demonstrates all that you can do.  By the end of the semester you will have applied your "studies" in a very practical way, showing to potential employers (or investors) your many talents and great potential!

You thought all those required courses that you didn't really want to take were going to be wasted?  Not at all!  Everything you've learned, every book you've read, every person you've met, every time you've struggled to stay awake during a lecture, every moment you've lived... somewhere in all of that you will find your idea.  It could be anywhere.

And what if nobody seems to be hiring when you graduate in May?  The job market has been pretty tight in recent years, a fact of which you are no doubt already aware.  If "nobody is hiring," what can you do?  Hire yourself.  If you play your cards right, by the end of the semester you may have already created a job for yourself, or maybe even a whole new company!  It can be done.  And you are just the person to do it.