Exposing Students to a State-of-the-art Problem Through a Capstone Project

Abstract

This Innovative Practice category Full Paper presents the use of a state-of-the-art research problem for a capstone project for third year computer engineering students. In our university, students were given the opportunity to work on a cutting edge problem - indoor navigation systems for the visually impaired. Indoor navigation is challenging because GPS signals cannot be received indoors. It is an area where a large amount of research is ongoing, and hundreds of scientific papers are published every year. For a successful implementation of the system, students had to draw on their knowledge of all the computer engineering concepts, ranging from digital electronic circuits, microprocessors, real-time systems, data structures and algorithms, software engineering, computer networking etc. In addition, students had to evaluate and adopt techniques from existing literature, and adapt them to meet the problem requirements. Thus, the project reinforced their knowledge of fundamentals, while exposing them to a problem with no obvious solution. The main evaluation was conducted as a competition, where students were blindfolded and were required to navigate between two indoor locations. Their system had to download the maps from a server, compute the optimal route to the destination, and students had to navigate there based only on voice and/or haptic commands provided by their system. Some constraints were imposed to ensure that the problem did not get trivialized and accurately represented a real-world scenario. Quantitative and qualitative results from the module feedback surveys showed significant improvement over the previous capstone project. The surveys indicate that the nature of the project and the evaluation process provided adequate challenge and excitement to students, while facilitating effective learning. Students were able to exercise their creativity, and come up with a number of interesting positioning techniques. Such a project ensured that the learning process cemented their understanding of subject fundamentals while addressing a novel research problem that is current, and has a potentially huge societal and commercial impact.