Teaching Students to Design and Implement Social Networks Using MVC as a Capstone Experience

Undergraduate CS courses involve a range of design and development experiences which are often brought together in a comprehensive way as a capstone project in a student´s senior year. The goal of a capstone experience is to help students demonstrate that they can integrate various CS skills they have been taught in a practical way. The importance of being able to apply what a student has learned in a practical way as a student prepares to graduate and enter the workforce cannot be overstated. We have developed a Capstone Course project where students build a social networking application using ASP.NET MVC to integrate skills learned in Programming Principles, Software Engineering, Database Design and Web Design courses. And we believe this type of project can serve as a model that can be applied in many different schools and contexts. Because the MVC pattern is used, each part of the system is modular, with the model, the view and the controller requiring different sets of skills. Students can apply their skills to implementing the entire framework themselves as it is presented to them, or they can redesign portions of the framework and integrate their redesign into the original architecture. Either way, students experience the integration of a wide variety of skills in a compelling way since they are doing so while building a social networking application that they can test on their friends.