Overview

All CS undergrads are required to take the Senior Design capstone in order to graduate. As a normal part of the course, student teams participate in an hour-long project management session known as Task Planning, wherein they outline preliminary requirements and system architecture, along with “estimating hours [and] defining project scope . . . demonstrating proactive leadership, clarifying project deliverables, and maintaining follow-through” (Heil, 2019).

HALLPASS involves reframing the Task Planning activity with an EM, inviting students to take part in Micromoment activities designed to help them refine their project ideas and timeline.

Why Do You Need a HALLPASS?

While Senior Design faculty have facilitated Task Planning sessions for nearly 1,000 student teams over the past quarter century, until now Tasking has not included any Micromoment activities as a way of engaging students. Nor has there been a way to qualitatively evaluate which learning activities within task planning students find more effective and which they perceive as less effective to their learning process.

This is where HALLPASS comes in! HALLPASS stands for How Active Learning Leads to Planning, Analyzing, Sketching, and Scoping a team project. HALLPASS consists of two components: Micromoments tailored specifically to Task Planning and a survey gauging the pedagogical activities around Task Planning from the student perspective.

Instructions

Task Planning with a HALLPASS is adaptable to many Engineering courses, from first-year classes through senior-level courses, that are project-based in nature. Instructors facilitate the session, but are really only there to guide students as they make their own discoveries.

This is ideally a one-on-one session with each team and the instructor/facilitator, though it could also be modeled in front of the whole class, with students then going off to task plan with their teammates.

It generally takes one hour for each Task Planning HALLPASS session, and a typical session goes something like this:

~First 10 minutes: greet the team with a TopHat quiz assessing how they feel about Task Planning. Then jump in with a Micromoment #1 activity (see Instructor Tips)

~10–15 minutes: begin filling out a project timeline using the course calendar, pencilling in team sponsor meetings, course assignment deadlines, etc.

~15–25 minutes: define preliminary requirements (or refine requirements/elaborate on features if teams already have come up with a set of requirements)

~25–40 minutes: sketch a system architecture diagram (using a Micromoment #2 activity as needed) (see Instructor Tips)

~40–50 minutes: delineate team implementation tasks based on iterative or sprint approach for frontend, backend, database, etc.

~50–55 minutes: think aloud about out testing strategies (i.e. acceptance testing, unit testing, playtesting, performance testing)

~55–60 minutes: wrap up the Task Planning HALLPASS session with a TopHat exit quiz