ISEDJ

Abstract: Information systems capstone projects aim to prepare students for what they will encounter in the industry after graduation. Corporate application development is often a complex endeavor that requires coordination between related products. For example, software development in the mobile application sector may require a coordinated parallel development of native cellphone applications and mobile web applications. The dual approach taken by these companies enable end users to access the application over a wide variety of devices and operating systems. Instructors usually must choose between a mobile web development environment and a native development environment such as Android or iPhone. In order to provide students with a learning experience that incorporates additional complexities of the real world, a challenging capstone course project is presented that requires a large team to implement the same application in both environments. This course was implemented in a single semester at Bentley University in the spring of 2015. Student teams created pub crawl applications based on stops within a local mass transit system that would run both on an Android phone and on a mobile website. Java, Eclipse and Google’s Android SDK were used to create the Android component. JQuery, HTML5, PHP and JavaScript constituted the development environment used to create the mobile web component. The project management and coordination of the two development environments within a single team resulted in unexpected challenges. Factors leading to varying degrees of successful completion of the team capstone projects are presented along with lessons learned.

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Download this article: ISEDJ - V15 N6 Page 27.pdf

Recommended Citation: Wong, W., Pepe, J., Englander, I. (2017). Raising the Bar: Challenging Students in a Capstone Project Course With an Android and Mobile Web Parallel Development Team Project. Information Systems Education Journal, 15(6) pp 27-42. http://isedj.org/2017-15/ ISSN: 1545-679X. (A preliminary version appears in The Proceedings of EDSIG 2016)