The silence of the room is broken only by the clattering of keyboards. Students line the desks, their faces illuminated by the white lines of code on their screens. This is Computer Science Capstone, where students bring their focus to real-world applications of their projects.
CS Capstone is a year-long dual-enrollment course that prepares students to apply their computer science skills in a real-world setting, bridging classroom learning with career-oriented application. It follows a structure different from the majority of classes Paly has to offer, using a year-long, project-based curriculum as opposed to multiple different lessons and units. As a result, students must demonstrate independence, strong academic discipline, and overcome difficult decisions, challenges, and everything in between.
According to junior Deniz Buyukkokten, the amount of investment required in CS Capstone is strongly dependent on the type of project a student decides to pursue.
“It [time investment] depends on your project and how much you challenge yourself,” Buyukkokten said. “Like I said, the rigor is very dependent on what you choose to do. When it comes to assessments, the biggest thing you’re graded on is how much you learn.”
When it comes to choosing the right project, CS Capstone teacher Christopher Bell says that the best projects are the ones that inspire their respective students the most.
“I just kind of guide them into picking what they’re most interested in,” Bell said. “Students will come up with two or three ideas, and then we’ll sit down and talk about [what they will look like] over the course of a year, what’s going to be the thing that’s going to inspire you the most? Because that’s the thing you’re going to pay more attention to and that you’re going to do during those times when you don’t want to do something else.”
The first month is spent picking and planning projects, which is when students brainstorm ideas to help decide their projects for the rest of the year.
“We spend the good first month of school breaking projects into manageable chunks,” Bell said. “We come up with ideas that people are interested in and then we guide them through the process of actually building it over time.”
Throughout the rest of the year, students continue working on projects while also giving presentations on other computer science-related topics.
“You get some project time during class, too, and then there’s a presentation,” Bell said. “So it’s a mix of working on your project and working on the giant presentation where you do like a demo for the entire class and try to teach them something.”
CS Capstone enables students like Buyukkokten to realize their ambitious projects. Buyukkokten saw this as an opportunity to carve a path into the AI assistant sphere he hadn’t seen anyone else do before.
“I chose to try to make AI interact with software, especially after I looked it up and realized no one else was doing it the same way I wanted to,” Byukkokkten said.
Byukkokkten’s vision is to create a project that goes beyond the scope of the classroom and raises the quality of life for people in the real world.
“If it gets to a level where I’m satisfied, it’ll be open source, free to everyone,” Byukkokkten said. “It would be very nice to have an AI assistant where … You can just tell it [what to do], whether that’s by speech or by typing.”
Byukkokkten is also considering accessibility, ensuring his AI can be equally beneficial to all people.
“[It would be] really good for anyone who’s disabled, because the way I’m designing it. … if you’re blind, you should be able to use it just fine. … if you literally don’t have hands, you should be able to use it just fine. Even if you can’t speak, you can [use it],” Buyukkokten said.
Working on his project is a complex task and is not without its struggles. Buyukkokten often faces bugs and growing academic pressure, impacting his ability to work on his project.
“A [part] of coding is [that] your code will inevitably error at some point, and you’ll have to fix it,” Byukkokkten said. It’s junior year, so there’s a ton of other classes that keep having all these different tests coming up, and that really makes [working on my project] more difficult.
Sometimes students hit roadblocks when working on their projects, but, according to Bell, it can teach them important lessons about the realities of computer science.
“We’ve had technical issues where we can actually no longer continue with this project the way that it is. So now we have to pivot and rework, which is valuable, but it can also be frustrating.”
According to Bell, all of the best projects he sees all have one thing in common — passion.
“I mean, that [passion], that’s the number one thing in all different fields,” Bell said. So there isn’t one field or topic that is better; students’ interest [is what] makes [projects] useful.”
