Those of you who have participated before can probably skip to the second part of this email; for those of you who haven’t: Fundamentals of Cloud Computing is a senior/graduate-level class that includes a semester-long capstone-like project, with the projects being proposed and supervised by an industry mentor. The projects are completed in teams of 5-7 students, who are expected to spend 5-8 hours per week on the project over the 13-week term, with presentations to the class every two weeks to evaluate their progress. Although some of the students’ time will be spent learning new technologies, in prior years many teams have achieved significant results, ranging from nice-to-have tools to (typically open-source) product enhancements.

We are looking for project proposals for next semester, of a size appropriate for a team of 5-7 students. The goals of these projects are to:

• Give students experience in web and/or cloud technologies
• Give them real experience as part of an agile development team
• (hopefully) Develop a useful artifact 

Projects are typically (but not always) open source, and students will share significant details of concept and design with instructors and the class as part of the evaluation process.

Students will rank their choice of project and will be assigned to projects based on preference and a skills survey. As a result, you should expect a team which is motivated, has some (hopefully all) of the skills you have requested, and represents a cross-section of class ability.

The students will have substantial course-based experience; many of the students will have co-op or prior employment experience, but if so it may have been as part of a large organization where others specified architecture and design. As a mentor your goal will be to help translate their academic knowledge and prior experience to help them elicit requirements and then design and build a real artifact to solve a real problem.

Mentors are critical to project success. We will need mentors with the technical expertise to help guide the students - you should have the skills (if not the time) that would be needed to complete the project, and be able to answer technical questions the students ask. (even if the appropriate response is often to show them where to look for the answer) The typical time commitment is about 2 hours/week, although often this can be shared between a technical and non-technical mentor. Meeting times are outside of class hours and are negotiated with students, and will be done remotely via Zoom etc. 

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