Cube Senior Design Program- Summer 2015
- I am the lead curriculum designer for the CS/CSE Senior Design Projects at the Cube, and I am mentored by Professor Mark Fontenot.
- 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 has been 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 grow their seed idea into a start up company.
- 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)
- In order to develop this program, I am doing a large amount of research into the area of start-up development so that the program that we design for the Senior Design Teams will give them high quality advice and so that the program 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.
- Over the course of the summer, I will be using the information I gain from my research to develop a curriculum that the Senior Design Teams will follow over the course of two semesters
- As part of regular Cube business, I chair the bi-weekly board meetings to facilitate project progress and collaboration