What is the capstone?

The CCPA Senior Capstone consists of two parts: the project and the research paper.

The Project: students have been paired into groups of 6 that have been determined by the senior capstone committee. The year-long objective is to build a useful Android app to server a need of the East Oakland community. Students will learn how to utilize the Design Thinking process to learn about the needs of real people and build a product that serves them best.

Within the group of six, students must a team first by selecting from well-defined roles: project manager, visionary, research, designer, and programmer. Each of these roles represents both a functional necessity and lense of thinking to problem solving. Through this process, students will learn that good teams need diverse talents and personalities to succeed. Students should walk away from this project with a strong sense of self-efficacy and bias toward autonomy.

The Research Paper: students will individually research and write a research paper on a subtopic within the broader topic that their team has chosen to focus on. The contents of this paper will reflect the student's ability to produce strong academic writing that sufficiently meets the expectations of freshman-level college courses. This paper can be viewed as the theoretic application of students' senior project. The majority of the work for this paper will happen during in the Humanities course.