Project Summary
As part of my capstone design course in computer science, we focused on the area of CS education. Each of us had to think of a project that we wanted to do in the area of CS education, research it and present our results. Every week we read a research paper by a group of CS professors, and discussed them. My project was focused on the effects of internship experience on the technical knowledge of graduating students.
Technologies used
There were no programming related technologies used because this was not a programming project.
Responsibilities and Roles
This course only had 6 students, including me. Each of us did our own project and presented on it. This course was very work heavy – we had a paper summary due every week. Assignment one focused on algorithm visualizers which we had to demonstrate one we liked. Assignment two was making our own programming assignment to give to students in an IDE of our choice. Then the project had to include a presentation and a paper summary.
Project Details
My project was to compare graduating PEY students with those that had not taken PEY, and give them a set of interview questions pulled from Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc (thanks to Glassdoor). I distributed these as a questionnaire using SurveyMonkey because it was midterm time and an online questionnaire was the most convenient method. I also had a marking scheme which I marked on based on the ‘quality’ of the answers. However, while I got a total of 16 responses, 6 of them were total nonsense answers which had nothing to do with the question, and 10 of them were actually valid.

The results showed that the average answer for the PEY student is actually similar to that of the non PEY student. However PEY students tended to be more consistent with decent or above average answers while non PEY students were split between poor and great responses. I think that if an actual funded project were to be done in the future, I could distribute the questionnaires randomly which eliminates self selection bias, and increase the sampling size, which were clearly problems in this study.
Source/repo
Project Proposal
Project Questionnaire
CSC490 Powerpoint Presentation
CSC490 Project Report
Github Repo
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