Team Formation & Preliminary Abstract

Week 0: Team Formation & Agile Initialization

Form Your Team

• Form into teams of 2 or 3 students.
• Use the Wayfinding Game and tooling exercise to get acquainted with your teammates and the Capstone workflow.

Brainstorm Problem Ideas

• As a team, brainstorm broadly before narrowing — this is the “Choosing a Problem” step of the Capstone process, not a final commitment.
• Group brainstormed ideas by theme, then vote or discuss as a team to narrow toward the problem directions you’ll investigate in Week 1.

Draft Three Preliminary Abstracts

Write three short preliminary abstracts (about 3–5 sentences each). Bring all three to peer review. After feedback, choose one direction to carry into Week 1.

Each abstract should include:

Question	Quick definition	What students should identify
Who?	Who is affected by the problem?	The people, users, or groups experiencing the problem.
What?	What is the problem?	The specific situation, difficulty, inefficiency, or unmet need being investigated.
When?	When does the problem occur?	The situation, stage, event, or timeframe in which the problem appears.
Where?	Where does the problem occur?	The physical, digital, classroom, organizational, or system context.
How?	How could the problem be investigated or addressed?	The possible way to collect evidence, test ideas, or develop a solution.

Project Interest, Team Formation & Identity

Start working together
Use profile setup, Wayfinding Game activities, and group challenges to learn how potential teammates think, communicate, and approach problems.

Explore an area of interest
Use the OCS Intelligence Visual to identify an area that interests you and your potential teammates.

• Student Experience
• Learning Intelligence
• Platform Security
• Cloud Operations
• Data Engineering

Develop team identity
Once you have begun working together, establish a team identity:

• Team Name
• Project Interests
• Agile Manifesto / Team Norms
• Initial Roles

Create three preliminary abstracts
As a team, develop three possible project directions related to your areas of interest. Do not commit to a single problem yet. Use the Who, What, When, Where, and How questions to make each idea specific enough to investigate.

Classroom Sample Option 1 — Cognitive Load in Onboarding

Novice students often experience cognitive overload when starting JavaScript game development in OCS. This study would examine which onboarding steps create the most confusion and which supports reduce overload. The team would collect short reflection data and basic workflow observations. The goal is to identify practical scaffolds that improve early success.

Classroom Sample Option 2 — Classroom Opening and Attendance

In light of new cell phone restriction legislation, teachers face increased demands in the first few minutes of class managing phone collection, attendance, and student readiness. This study would examine whether automated or alternative systems can reduce classroom opening time while remaining reliable and equitable. The goal is to reduce teacher effort and student disruption while getting students ready to learn.

Classroom Sample Option 3 — Team Selection

Students form long-term project teams primarily through existing friendships, which can limit the range of skills, interests, and perspectives within the team. This study would examine whether wayfinding and gamification experiences can help students understand team composition, recognize different perspectives, and make more intentional team choices. The goal is to develop a team-selection process that encourages more diverse and effective project teams.

Peer Review Rubric (Preliminary Abstracts)

Score each abstract on a 1–4 scale (1 = needs major revision, 4 = strong and ready for Week 1).

Criteria	1	2	3	4
Problem clarity	Problem is unclear	Problem is partly defined	Problem is clear	Problem is precise and focused
Stakeholder impact	Affected group missing	Group named but vague impact	Group and impact are clear	Group, impact, and context are compelling
Researchability	No clear way to study	Method idea is weak	Feasible method is present	Method is feasible and measurable
Relevance to classroom theme	No clear classroom relevance	Limited classroom connection	Clear classroom connection	Strong classroom relevance and practical value

Peer-review protocol:

1. Present all three abstracts to peers.
2. Receive scores/comments for each criterion.
3. Revise the top option based on feedback.
4. Carry one selected direction into Week 1.

Set Up Your Project Management

• Initialize a professional engineering portfolio.
  • Add cards for all three abstract options.
  • Create a peer-review decision checkpoint summary.
  • Write a summary of the decision process.
• Stand up a digital Kanban board (GitHub Projects) to log tasks, user stories, and acceptance criteria.

Need to update a submission later? Open the submissions dashboard.