Pete Gutierrez

Senior Project

Competencies: Coding, Instructional Technology, PD

Background

Every year the graduation senior class is offered the opportunity to participate in a semester-long program allowing students to apply their skills and knowledge into an area of interest in the real world. The goal of the program is to provide real, hands-on experience on careers or topics of interest. There is a lengthy approval process for participating that includes finding a mentor, and locating a business or individual who will act as their sponsor or direct manager. Students who participate are required to work in leu of attending school, provide daily updates, and engage in ongoing conversations with all participating parties sponsoring the student.

Each student must create a proposal and have it approved by a committee. A proposal must highlight the nature of their work, intended schedule, and outcomes for their project. At the end of the semester, each student is required to return and give a presentation to the community highlighting their experiences and showcasing the final product of their work as described in the proposal. These products vary in scope and complexity- in some years, students created art installations, written novels and custom built motorcycles.

Objectives

I was approached in late 2014 to reimagine Senior Project with an emphasis on intake, collaboration and communication processes. I worked closely with the coordinators of the project to identify several key milestones for this project:

  • We want to digitize the intake process to scale and maintain accurate records. Additionally we want to build a networking database from all parties involved in sponsoring students to help ease the process of sponsorship for future senior classes.
  • We want to utilize technologies to increase collaboration between the coordinators, mentors and students. Ideally we want students to iterate over their Senior Project proposals to focus and develop strong final presentations.
  • We want to leverage our 1:1 iPad environment to facilitate communication outside of school grounds when students have been dismissed to their senior projects.

Additionally, any solution would have to be easy to use, and self contained. Coordinators should be able to quickly archive old data and reuse the solution every year.

Outcomes

Much like how students iterate their proposals before receiving approval to participate in senior project, I too had to iterate over key milestones over the course of several years. After serious discussions with key stakeholders, we agreed that two institutional commitments would serve as foundations to move Senior Project forward:

  • Our 1:1 iPad program giving each student a personal device.
  • A push to standardize learning management systems by providing support for one single platform.

Taken together we could use both to realize our goals to increase collaboration and communication. We agreed to a schedule across several years designed to leverage these institutional commitments once they were fully implemented.

From our initial conversations in 2014, I worked with the coordinators to develop a web app with a backend of Javascript, HTML and CSS that would allow students to login using their student Google SSO credentials. Students could:

  • Fill out a form via the app at their own pace. Changes were saved to a Google Sheet owned by the Senior Project coordinators. Coordinators could view changes in real time and make modifications as needed.
  • Generate a completed proposal as a Google Doc from the app. Their completed proposal was then shared automatically to their sponsor, mentor and the coordinators for commenting and approval.

By using Google to assist with record-keeping, we could leverage revision history, sharing, and real-time collaboration. This was beneficial for students and the coordinators looking to have up to date information on everything from emergency contact information to schedules.

By 2017, our institution had completed their goal of standardizing their learning management system, Canvas, to align with our 1:1 program. The next step was to incorporate Canvas to assist in the communication piece of Senior Project.

The coordinators and I created and built a Canvas course that would serve as a landing page for everything related to Senior Project. I worked with our Enterprise Applications team to ensure that student enrollments were automatically generated via our SIS to the course. Mentor and sponsor enrollments were added via an api call through Google Sheets. We utilized groups to create private spaces that allowed students to share daily check-ins and weekly reflections with both their mentors, sponsors and the coordinators. Messaging in the Canvas platform served as instant communication instead of email. Assignments were used to provide students with milestone reminders.

Senior project improved as our technology platforms grew more sophisticated. We migrated from my custom web app to Google Forms when platform updates to data validation and automation made it feasible. Migrating to Google Forms gave coordinators more ownership over the process by making it easier to manage and modify form(s) via Google.

In the migration, we segmented the Senior Project process into several Google Forms that fed into a single Google Sheet. In this “master” spreadsheet, I developed a dashboard using formulas to automatically curate data from each intake form giving coordinators a more nuanced understanding over how far along each student was in the senior project process. The spreadsheet also contained triggers to ease the communication effort of coordinators. For example, when students filled out a form identifying their project sponsor, a trigger would automatically send a template email to the potential sponsor with a link to another form to verify and confirm their role. These steps, when completed, would update the “progress bar” on the dashboard. Each google form was also eventually tied to Canvas assignments that helped provide additional accountability and visibility into overall student progress for mentors and sponsors.

Over nearly a decade, Senior Project has served thousands of students, providing valuable and practical skills in a unique setting. Over that time period, I worked with the coordinators to:

  • Make sure that the core objectives of this project were being met. If new technologies or workflows would make the process easier, I would propose the changes, along with a timeframe and collaborate with the coordinators make necessary improvements.
  • Provide adequate professional development and documentation on all changes and workflow updates to ensure coordinators were adequately prepared to manage senior project.

My final update to Senior Project came in 2022 when we made a number of workflow changes to align with our move to in-person instruction after COVID. Whereas there used to be three coordinators involved in the process of managing senior project initially, only one coordinator is required now to lead Senior Project, as the workflows are largely automated. The coordinator can quickly update the Senior Project intake forms and begin the process for receiving applicants in the same day. Senior Project is an encapsulation of my working philosophy– communicate and collaborate with stakeholders and create great solutions using familiar tools and workflows.