In the Spring 2014 semester, we will be offering our DSCI 40910 Capstone in Digital Sciences course for the first time. Our plan is to have multiple sections of this course every semester, each of which will be partnered with a project course in another major. Our students and the students in that major will work together on a large project, with each set of students bringing different skills to the project.
Both of our Spring 2014 Capstone courses are partnered with a course offered by the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In both courses, the JMC students will focus on the storytelling and news aspects, while our students will assist with programming, web development, project management, etc. The end result of the first course will be an interactive web site about the Cuyahoga River, while the end result of the second course will be an iPad magazine about The Holden Arboretum.
Each Capstone course is limited to 8 students, so those students who plan to graduate in May 2014 should register quickly before the courses fill.
Note that the pre-requisites for DSCI 40910 are DSCI 41510 Global Project Management and Team Dynamics and TECH 46411 Requirements Engineering and Analysis.
The first capstone option is "Web Programming for Multimedia Journalism", offered as DSCI 40910-001, CRN 20252. Here's an abstract for this course:
- This Spring, break out of template-based Web design and dig deep into the responsive, scrolling multimedia tools used in great storytelling journalism on the Web, like Snow Fall from the New York Times and Firestorm from The Guardian. In this class, journalists and programmers will create an engaging, interactive website to tell in-depth stories and illuminate and explain the challenges, successes and continuing issues related to the Cuyahoga River and the people who care about it.
The second capstone option is "Mobile Publishing", offered as DSCI 40910-004, CRN 20257. Here's an abstract for this course:
- Create a Rolling Stone for Conservation - on the iPad. The earth. We all live here, yet we rarely think of soil, plants or the people to tend to them. At The Holden Arboretum, scientists are doing research to learn from the earth and help save it. Naturalists are teaching and volunteers are working. They are rock stars, but their stories have rarely been told. Until now. In one semester, student writers, programmers, designers, photographers, editors and videographers will craft a new magazine about the people who remind us of our connection -- and our responsibility -- to nature.