Instructor-formed capstone teams based on interest and technical experience: the road to success

In this paper, we adopt many good-enough capstone practices in the literature, apply it in our capstone class for one year and share our experiences. Our capstone classes take two semesters, consist of junior and senior students, and the teams have to work with a real client. We form our capstone teams based on homogeneous interests and heterogeneous technical skill level of the students. Students fill a survey at the beginning of the class to specify their technical expertise and project interest (without revealing the projects, only using the domain and technological keywords of the projects). This approach yields a more successful result for both the students, the instructors, and the real clients. We also adopt a personal contribution weight (PCW), which is a combination of various aspects we gather throughout the capstone class, to distinguish individual team member's grades.