Cube Curriculum Design

Over the course of the 2015 summer, I worked to develop a curriculum that the Cube could use to help student teams improve on their project ideas and take the first steps toward turning their idea into a tangible business. For this first stage of the curriculum design process, the target users of this curriculum were SMU Senior engineering students who would be working with the Cube as part of their Senior Design Project. 

Senior Design
At SMU, each senior engineering student completes a senior design project in which they work two semesters on a multi disciplinary team of engineering students to solve a problem.  Until 2015, the problems were given to them by an outside company or organization. For this upcoming school year (2015-2016), Professor Mark Fontenot (SMU Lyle School of Engineering, Computer Science department) is taking over the Senior Design class for CS students so that they can use their time in Senior Design to work on their own ideas.

Because of the start-up-like nature of these self driven projects, the Cube was asked to parter with the Senior Design program to put the seniors through a start-up acceleration cycle to help turn their ideas into more viable businesses. The process can be best summarized as, the CS/CSE Senior design students develop their idea(s) and the Cube helps them develop their seed idea into the beginnings of a start up company. 

Goals
Our goal is to introduce the seniors to the information that they will need to consider when trying to turn their idea into a business and to get them to a final stage where they are prepared to pitch their prototype and rough business model to interested investors. At this time, we will not directly help the teams gain funding.
  • We want to get the teams thinking about the core ideas that make up their business (what problem they are solving, who their customers are, how they are going to solve the problem, and why their solution is the best option) and learning some of the techniques they should employ to successfully build their company (such as striving for Validated Learning, the key component of Eric Ries’s Lean Startup methodology)

Execution
In order to develop this program, I did (and continue to do) a large amount of research into the area of start-up development so that the program will give the Senior Design Teams high quality advice and that has a logical natural progression through the concepts that we are introducing to the teams

The vast majority of the research that I am performing to develop this program is described in my self study section.

​As part of regular Cube business, I chair the bi-weekly board meetings to facilitate project progress and collaboration