Pergamon Comput. & Graphics, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 463-471, 1996 Copyright 0 1996 ElsevlerScienceLtd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0097-8493196 $15.00 f 0.00 soow-8493(%)oooa7-9 Education EXPERIENCE FROM 10 YEARS OF STUDENT PROJECTS ORIENTED TOWARDS GRAPHIC INTERACTION LARS KJELLDAHL and YNGVE SUNDBLAD Numerical Analysis and Computing ScienceNADA, Royal Institute of Technology-KTH, S-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: lassekj@nada.kth.se Abstract-The characteristics of a project course (160h of work for the students) oriented towards graphical interaction is described. Project proposals are presented to the students by researchers from different applications. The students get a high degree of freedom during the project and partlyas a result of this they are enthusiastic about the work and produce very impressive prototypes which they present at the end of the course. Copyright (Q 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd 1. INTRODUCTION Here we describe a student project course,aimed at graphic interface development, given by us at NADA at KTH for school D since 1985. The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) is the largest technical university in Sweden with 7500students and a staff of some2500, founded in 1828.The departmentof Numerical Analysis and Computing Science (NADA) has a staff of approximately 150. The department is divided into laboratories: IPLab, the Interaction and Presentation Laboratory; CVAP, Computational Vision and Active Perception Lab- oratory; SANS, Studies of Artificial Neural Net- works; PDC, Center for Parallel Computers; C2M2, Center for Computational Mathematics and Mech- anics;TCS, Theoretical Computer Science. School D, the School of Computer Science and Engineering, is one of the 11 schools of the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, and gives a % year Master’s education, 60 accepted every year since 1983,120yearly since1991. One goal of the education is to give the students experience with and the ability to use advanced programming tools and to develop powerful, user- friendly applicationswith and for modern technol- ogy, i.e. graphic workstations and object-oriented programmingthrough environments such as Visual Works\Smalltalk. 2. PROJECT COURSE A project course is given for all computer science students (currently 120)at the end of the third year. One main idea and goal of the courseis to let the students use their knowledge and get experiences of a “real” project for “real use”. Eachstudentgets credit for four full time weeks, working part-time for about 2 months in a team in cooperationwith the teacher responsiblefor the project course. Teachers and researchers from departments at KTH, and in some cases colleagues that now work in industry (here calledoriginatorsfor short) define computer applica- tion software projects among which the students prioritize. After assignment by the course leaderof a specific project the students are rather free to make the detaileddesign together with the originator. The teams are expected to put particular effort into a goodgraphicuserinterfaceof the resulting computer application. 3. PROJECT SCHEDULE Thework is performed in groups of approximately 6-8 students and they each get credit for 160 h of work. The projects are usually oriented towards applications and interaction, i.e. not necessarily “pure” graphics. The students are expected to produce at least a working prototype. A rough sketchof the schedule for performing the project follows: -Invitation to define projects sent out by course leader to teachers and researchers. -Short project descriptions on paper receivedfrom originators and compiled into a hand-out. -Five-minute presentations of projects by origina- tors to the students. -Introductory lectures related to project work with topics such as experiences of project work in a big organization, experiences of project work in a small organization, dynamics of working in a group, documentation requirements, capability maturity model (a model for description of soft- ware quality). -Students, single or in groups, hand in forms prioritizing projects. -Projects assigned by course leader to student teams formed adapting as well as possible to the prioritized forms. -Contact established between project team and originator. 463