Full Sail is known for giving students a platform to make their creative ideas come to life. This approach holds true in the online Computer Science master’s program in which students must develop a unique project from start to finish.

Through applied programming, this graduate-level coursework takes a deep dive into data structures, software engineering, software architecture, and creative problem-solving. The projects are part of the capstone sequence of courses, which comprise the final four classes of the curriculum. These courses include Software Project: Research, Planning, & Design, Software Project: Development I, Software Project: Development II, and Software Project: Deployment & Professional Presentation.

Students can choose from three options – an individual project, a team project, or an industry organization or partnership project. Projects must have some type of software product, a focus on artificial intelligence, data science, or human-computer interaction, and a research component in the form of a research paper, white paper, or poster. In addition, students must identify and work with an advisor who teaches in the program.

“We make sure the students have a consistent voice guiding them through the process,” explains Program Director Dr. Rebecca Leis. “All of the advisors have Ph.D.s.”

For his project, Hunter Winghart built an iOS app called MageMemo. The app is a gamified Pomodoro timer designed to help users manage their time more efficiently. His advisor for the project was course director Dr. Ahmed Al Zaidy.

“Hunter had never programmed in Swift before and wanted to go outside of his comfort zone,” Dr. Leis recalls. “He wanted to challenge himself, and he did some things that weren’t requirements of the project.”

She thought this app stood out in several ways compared to similar tools out there.

“Visually the project was very impressive… Because of the images that he chose, he was able to do custom themes, and he was able to program those in there; I haven't really seen very many Pomodoro tools be able to customize themes in that way,” she says. “And then he was able to include some background music, which was really cool because again, not a lot of timers do that. And if they do, it's not synced up in the same way that he had synced it up.”

To gamify the app, he wrote a short story and sprinkled it throughout the user interface of the app so that users can essentially follow the story during the timed breaks that the app presents.

Hunter, who also earned an Information Technology bachelor’s degree from Full Sail, is the first student to graduate from the Computer Science master’s program to have a paper published in a professional journal. His white paper appeared in the Journal of Information Technology, Cybersecurity, and Artificial Intelligence this year.

Another student, Toby Gamble, turned his passion for sports into a basketball statistics app called Stat Beast Hoops. The iOS app compares basketball teams and players by displaying side-by-side statistics, bar charts, and line graphs. Course director Dr. Andreas Marpaung served as his project advisor.

“Toby was a particularly impressive student. He covered gap areas that other stats-related sports products do not focus on,” Dr. Leis says.

Using Swift and SwiftUI, he created statistical models through data visualizations and machine learning.

“The way he presented the info was very clean, concise, and he was able to communicate what he did effectively and efficiently,” she adds.

Now that he's graduated, Toby hopes to expand the app to present data on other sports leagues, such as Major League Baseball. The Navy veteran is also a mobile development grad from Full Sail.

According to Dr. Leis, there are numerous benefits to having students create these projects. They expose students to the entire software development life cycle, human subject testing for usability, and what’s involved in creating an Institutional Review Board (IRB) application. More broadly, they’re a great way for students to demonstrate their experience after they've graduated.

“The biggest benefit is to have some kind of portfolio item that they have exclusively worked on,” she says. “They can have a full, end-to-end product that showcases their talent and their unique value to an employer.”