A Tablet PC Capstone
Course
Richard Anderson
Department of Computer Science
and Engineering
University of Washington
CSE 490 RA
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Tablet PC Project course offered at UW
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Prototype offering Winter 2003
First real offering Spring 2003
Planned for Fall 2003
This talk
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Course offerings
Discussion of Tablet PC project courses
Capstone classes
Group project to draw together
undergraduate experiences
 Widely offered in engineering
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 Many
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Common format
 Team
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success stories
oriented development project
Goals
 Learn
about exciting application domain
 Experience working in a group
 Product life cycle
UW Context
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Established Capstone courses in CS
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Department support for Capstone
courses
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Computer games
Animation
Hardware design
25 students per course
Reasonable lab support
Quarter system
Workload
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Capstone Project
 User
studies
 Project specification
 Working code
 Polished distribution
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Individual homework assignments
 Tablet
PC exercises
 User centered design exercises
Curricular goals
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Context design (HCI)
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User studies
Paper prototypes
Personas
Heuristic Evalution
Software Engineering
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Development team
Requirements
Release cycle
Curricular Goals
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Pen computing
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Mobile computing
UI Considerations for stylus based apps
Form factor
Tablet PC Development
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Windows programming
Tablet PC SDK
Fun with ink
Advanced facilities (reco, gestures)
Course mechanics
~5 person teams
 Projects from selected list
 Programming assignments
 Design assignments
 Lectures on HCI and Pen computing
early in the quarter
 Lectures used for group meetings with
instructors and checkpoint
presentations later in quarter
 Final presentations
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Elevator Application
Elevator Application
Photo by Dan Lamont
Homework grading
Homework Grading
Photo by Dan Lamont
Shared whiteboard for
remote tutoring
Discussion
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Resources to teach a Tablet PC course
Tablet PC Curricula
Why use the Tablet PC in a project
course
Tradeoffs in course emphasis
C# and .NET in the course
Resources
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Software
 Tablet
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PC SDK, Visual Studio .NET
Hardware
 Substantial
Tablet PC development can be
on the desktop
 But not all Tablet PC facilities are available
 Important to experience the form factor and
the high quality ink
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For 25 students we started with 5 Tablet
PCs and added 5 more mid quarter
Tablet PC Curricula
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Issues relating to the tablet form factor
Tablet PC SDK
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Basic use, e.g., an ink collector with
recognition
Advanced use – direct manipulation of ink
Students started with a series of
programming exercises such as TicTac-Toe
Reference: Building Tablet PC
Applications by Jarrett and Su
Why use the Tablet PC in a
project class?
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Cool new hardware
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Fit with an HCI oriented capstone
course
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Motivation
Create opportunities for the students
Usability and prototyping
Windows platform
Tradeoffs in emphasis
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Contextual Design
Software Engineering
Pen / Mobile Computing
Tablet PC SDK
Window Development
35%
20%
20%
15%
10%
C# and .NET in the course
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Windows and .NET programming
successful
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Students liked C#
Basically positive attitude
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Students signed up for the course aware of
the platform
All groups built very good windows apps
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Required to submit project as .MSI
Many students started with little Windows
background
What Microsoft could do to
help .NET project courses
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Software infrastructure is very
important for team projects
Provide a usable version control
system integrated with Visual Studio
Release bug tracking software
Course information
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http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/
courses/490ra/
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