Work in Progress - Computer Science Perspectives on Integration with Human-Centered Design

Capstone courses in many disciplines often fall into a single paradigm: they allow students to practice the skills they should have gathered through their progress in the department curriculum in a real-world or near-real venue. However, these courses often fail the real-world test by one important factor: they are not interdisciplinary projects, which is not indicative of industry experiences. We are attempting to create an interdisciplinary environment for capstone courses, involving both design and computer science students, to more adequately prepare students for industry work. This work-in-progress paper describes our experiences and plans for bettering the interdisciplinary capstone experience. The experiences show that there is a fundamental miscommunication between students of different disciplines that hinders their ability to collaborate. By analyzing qualitative questionnaires from thirty-three computer science students, we have affirmed the existence of this rift in inter-departmental understanding. This realization has formed our basis for creating educational modules to ease the collaboration between computer science and design students.