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For Project Partners

You are an industry professional, founder, or 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.

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 before the term, which is why the write-up has to sell the project.

  • Description, Problem Statement, and Objectives. What you would hand a summer intern: a complete system or feature, off your critical path. For some of the team this is their first real project.
  • Qualifications. Minimum and preferred, knowing that many students might not yet have taken the higher level elective classes yet.
  • IP and NDA. Say in the proposal whether the project requires an intellectual property agreement, a non-disclosure agreement, or both. Either is fine and neither disqualifies a project; both are visible to students before they bid. IP, NDA, and Licensing has what each one changes, including why the teaching staff cannot be a party to one.
  • Several projects. Larger companies that want more than one team join INSPiRE Industry Affiliates. Individuals are never asked for a donation.
  • No idea yet? Talk to use or consider mentoring a student-proposed project. Questions about fit: cs-46x-help@oregonstate.edu.
  • Availability from the start of fall term to the end of spring term.
  • 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 will judge it, set with the students in the first sprint.
  • Reviews of their work and tests of their prototypes when they ask.
  • Repository read access for the teaching staff by default; under an NDA the team is assessed through live walkthroughs and sanitized evidence, same points.
  • An evaluation each term through our survey, against the project partner evaluation rubrics: progress in fall and winter, outcome in spring. Where a rubric does not fit, read it against the expectations you set.

Your evaluation is 25% of each student’s grade each term, the same weight as each of the other three components (grade architecture).

  • 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 a final survey in the weeks the schedule shows, and run the assignments that structure the team’s work.
  • Spring: make sure you receive a proper handoff of the work that has been performed during the year.

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.