Lessons Learned: Guidance for Building Community-Service Projects

This chapter presents an approach to using real projects for nonprofit agencies in computer science courses. The goals are to deliver a useful service to our nonprofit clients while providing a valuable learning experience to our students. The chapter builds on failures and difficulties encountered in past community-service projects. Risk factors are identified and measures devised to counter them. These measures include developing a systematic approach to managing such projects, enhancing course offerings to better prepare students for working on real projects, and building a repository of practical knowledge within the department. Proper communication between students within and between teams, as well as timely feedback to faculty better preparation and communication on the part of the community agencies is essential for effective projects. We also propose building an application framework, reusing proven design and implementation techniques to exploit the fact that many of our nonprofit clients have similar requirements.