Capstone projects are long-term group projects that the Computer Science students have to complete in their final year of studies. CapstoneED is a peer-assesement platform that aims to assist both students and lecturers in such projects. In this page I will go over some of the core ideas for the system, but there is so much more (in fact 2 dissertations worth of more) that I cannot cover everything here.
Students get frequent requests to complete gamified, fast acitvities in order to provide information about their experience with the project. Lecturers on the other hand get aggragate views from all their students/teams which allows them to be proactive when potential issues arise. This page focuses primarily on the student experience.
The application is split into 3 core parts; the api and two separate frontends for students and lecturers. Please be aware that the frontend was developed during Angular’s infancy and was our first endeavor into a large system. As such both the Angular team and ourselves were figuring things out, and sometimes we diverged from what is now considered best practice.
As of December 2025 I am in the process of bringing the project into Angular 20+
The bird’s eye view
The primary driving force behind this project is that capstone projects are long, and asking students to recollect their semester or year long experience right at the end of such a project is more often than not seen as a chore. Usually, students want to be done with a project by that time as there finals comming up. In addition to that, having a single point of evaluation/reflection is extremely prone to recency bias.
Instead we aim to make it easy for students to give frequent feedback throughout the project, through a game where the various teams compete with each other. This game can directly correlate to the grade process as well as provide proof of the student’s work. We also made everything web accessible as it is generally easier to just go to your portal and log your hours worked, complete your activities, etc instead of having to keep track everything in an Excel sheet for the end of the project.
The “game”
Let’s say that there is a Web Development class, and their capstone project is to make a website for a “client”. Students would split into a number of teams (one for each “client”) and in the scope of CapstoneED these teams would participate in one “game”. The goal of this game is to accumulate points by participating in the CapstoneED system, with the assesments and the feedback we have already briefly mentioned, but also through activities such as logging your work on your project.
Example game progress for the above scenario
The above image shows a possible example of our imaginary Web Development class. All data has been auto-generated for demo purposes. Students also get an overview of the project’s progress as shown below. The iterations are dynamically defined by the lecturer and should be made to fit the desired educational outcomes.
Example project status
Peer assessment
The goal of a peer assessment is to provide some feedback to your teammates but also to the lecturer about how the team is doing. In the following examples I will have multiple questions in each assessment but that is all configurable by the lecturer at any point, and the goal should be to have a very short to complete form.
We start with a range-type question where the student is asked assign each team member to a color where red is the minimum asignable value and green is the maximum. The zones that are assignable are configured by the lecturer. 
A range type question
I am personally proud of the WizardComponent (aka Stepper) shown here as it was completely implemented from scratch, with a very dynamic API making use of Angular’s content projection.
Next type of possible questions is the rank type question. In the range type it is possible to give everyone the same value (i.e. everyone did an excelent job). In ranking however, a distinct choice must be made for each member – which is also why we recommend sparing use of this type.
A tank type question
The final type is a simple feedback form where the student could leave specific comments for each team member. 
A feedback type question
Log tracking
Another activity we wanted to simplify was tracking how much work each student is doing on the project. The log system is not intended to be a 100% source of truth as we understand that some times, doing the work is what actually matters. To that end we aimed to simplify the process as much as possible, and to make it accessible from a mobile device so it can be done whenever the student has the time.
View of creating a new log entry in desktop and mobile