Software Dev Cycle As Part of CS Curriculum?

tcolvinMI wonders: "I graduated from a small private college a few years ago with a degree in Computer Science. The main focus of the program, at this particular college, was to give you the tools necessary to be able to learn any programming language based on conceptual information, while having been introduced to several popular languages such as VB, C, C++, and Java. However, there was no 'final project' course that introduced a student programmer to the process of software development as a whole. Today, I was talking with a professor and pitched the idea of introducing such a course that would allow students to essentially go through the entire process from design to deployment. Is there any need for such a course? If so, what lessons would you place an emphasis on? So far, my idea is to allow a student to design an application that can be completed within the alloted time frame, develop in an approved language (one they've had and one the professor also knows), go through the QA process and then finally deploy the app to be evaluated by the other students in the class, who have not participated in the project." If you went CS, how well did your lessons prepare you for real project work? If you had a chance to prepare other college students for a career in development, what things would you teach them, and why?

Comments

and better yet through calculus???

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

As a professor I see much of this has been solved as far as curriculum for Computer Science is concerned...

A student needs at least math theory through discrete mathematics, and better yet through calculus...

You're a "professor" of "computer science" and you think all a "computer scientist" needs is "discrete mathematics" [whatever the hell that is]?

Maybe, just maybe, a "computer scientist" might want to know just a little linear algebra & hilbert space theory, so that when they are asked to run a least squares regression, they'll have just the vaguest idea what all that AA* stuff is about?

Or maybe they might need to know just a little bit about fourier analysis & the discrete fourier transform, so that they might understand the manifest importance of the improvement from O(n^2) to O(nlog(n))?

Or maybe they might need to know some group theory, so that they could understand something like the Polya-Burnside method?

Good grief, and people wonder why the Chinese & Indians are cleaning our clocks...