For Project Partners
You’re an industry professional, a founder, or a faculty or staff member with a project a team of 3 to 4 computer science seniors can work on for three terms (30 weeks). It costs you an hour a week per team and two evaluations each term.
Submitting a Project
Section titled “Submitting a Project”Submissions close when fall term starts, and the earlier yours arrives, the more time we have to help you refine it.
Students rank the approved projects in a bidding survey in fall week 0, the first days of the term, so your write-up has to make them want to pick it.
- Description, Problem Statement, and Objectives: scope it like a summer internship project, a complete system or feature off your critical path. For some of the team, this is their first real project.
- Qualifications: minimum and preferred. Many students won’t have taken the upper-level electives yet.
- IP and NDA: say in the proposal whether the project requires an IP agreement, an NDA, or both. Either is fine and neither disqualifies a project; students see both flags before they bid. IP, NDA, and Licensing explains what each one changes, including why the instruction team can’t be a party to one.
- Several projects: larger companies that want more than one team join INSPiRE Industry Affiliates. We never ask individuals for a donation.
- No idea yet? Talk to us, or consider mentoring a student-proposed project. Questions about fit: cs-46x-help@oregonstate.edu.
What We Expect From You
Section titled “What We Expect From You”- Availability from the start of fall term through spring week 10.
- At least one hour a week per team to meet the students and answer questions.
- Technical guidance from you or a colleague; ask us if you need a technical mentor.
- Expectations for the work, and how you’ll judge it, set with the students in the first sprint.
- Reviews of their work and tests of their prototypes when they ask.
- Access in the team’s first two weeks: the repositories, data, accounts, hardware, and documentation of how the existing system is hosted and maintained, and any IP or NDA paperwork.
- Repository read access for the instruction team by default; under an NDA that rules out read access, checkpoints run as live walkthroughs, and you agree up front what sanitized submissions may show.
- Two evaluations each term through our surveys, a short midterm pulse and an end-of-term survey, against the project partner evaluation rubrics: progress in fall and winter, outcome in spring. Where a rubric doesn’t fit your project, read it against the expectations you set.
Your ratings are the starting point for 25% of each student’s grade each term, the same weight as each of the other three components (grade architecture). The instructors read every response, and an instructor may ask you about a rating before the score stands.
The comment you leave under each rating goes to the team as written, names included, so make it something they can act on. A concern about one student goes in the private questions at the end of the survey, which only the instruction team reads.
What We Do Each Term
Section titled “What We Do Each Term”- Fall: place students on your project through the bidding survey and share your contact; expect the team’s first email in week 1 or early week 2, when teams are announced.
- Every term: send a midterm pulse survey and an end-of-term survey in the weeks the schedule shows, and run the assignments that structure the team’s work.
- Spring: make sure you receive a handoff of the year’s work: a document you confirm, written so someone new can run and maintain the project from it and the repository.
Students owe the course about nine hours a week in fall and winter (3 credits each) and six in spring (2 credits), per student, meetings and class time included. Email us whenever a concern comes up.