Comments on Teammate’s Goals
My two teammates Michael and Katie offered unique goals to read and contrast against my own. My comment on Michael’s goal of becoming an educator:
I think that the education path is an excellent decision for you. From the time we spent together at community college, I could always tell you were particularly studious and were good at helping out other classmates in our CS courses. I think that it is a very rewarding path to take. While I don’t know much about their online master’s program, Harvard offers a very well formulated undergrad-level online CS curriculum that I have used in the past as supplemental education, and based on that I would recommend at least giving their program a look. Having an MS from Harvard would look nice on the wall too :P. (https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/graduate-degrees/software-engineering-degree).
https://vapula87.blogspot.com/2021/01/cst-300-week-4.html?showComment=1612923968257#c1469966141318101811
And for Katie, who is currently culminating a broad set of skills within the IT sphere:
DevOps is a very interesting role that I didn’t actually know much about until recently. The concept of a role that combines both writing software and also maintaining the systems that run it seems like a natural progression of both careers, and I can imagine that the need for DevOps will only grow with time. Your short-term goals and current job will prepare you well for this role, should you decide to go down that path.
https://katherinevickstrom.blogspot.com/2021/01/cst-300-major-proseminar-week-4.html?showComment=1612924485295#c4849895241184012009
Some Capstone Ideas
After viewing some previous capstone festivals from previous CSUMB CS Online cohorts over the past few weeks, I have had the opportunity to think over some possible ideas for a capstone project that I would like to implement.
The first idea that I have is that of an online tabletop game manager. I am a big fan of tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, and have not had the chance to play these games since before the COVID pandemic. This project would be a web-based game manager that would allow users to connect to a ‘game room’ that would be controlled by the ‘game master’, which would host all of the relevant game information that would usually be done on pen and paper on a table. It would allow for a chatroom-style game log, allow for dice rolls, and allow the game master to share files and information in the room while members communicate over a third-party voice software such as Skype.
Another possible project would be a multiplayer first-person shooter game which I have had the idea of in my head for many years. This would likely be made in a game engine toolkit like Unity or Unreal, using free assets available on those platform’s asset store. While this would be a fun project, the scope would likely be to large for an eight week period, and I would only be able to complete a prototype at best.
Finally, I would like to create a browser based trading card game in the vein of Magic: The Gathering that would be a truly cross-platform online game that anyone with an internet connection could play.
Week in Review
In this week’s lecture, we reviewed previous CS Online capstone festivals. We also read materials related to internships and post-graduate education. Reading these made me seriously consider looking for an internship sooner rather than later.
In the writing lab, we studied specifics about writing persuasively. Specifically, we learned about logical fallacies, which are common flawed logical arguments that people often use in order to make a strong but illogical argument. We also learned about loaded words, which are words that carry a secondary connotation that could give your argument a biased-sounding tone.