Projects in a software engineering (SE) curriculum have many advantages for students. For example, students gain teamwork and project management skills. Involving an external stakeholder can enhance the learning experience further. For instance, students have the opportunity to practice stakeholder management. Moreover, working on a project with a real external stakeholder can help them make informed career choices. This external stakeholder can be a company, a government institution, or an organization from civil society, called ‘client’ from here onwards. In this work, we focus on startups to investigate the collaboration between startups and students in SE projects. Furthermore, we developed and introduced a design thinking workshop.
We did the research in a project course at Delft University of Technology. It is the capstone course near the end of the major in Computer Science & Engineering. In this course, students take on a project for a ‘client’. This external stakeholder brings in the project’s objective. Every student group has a unique project from different clients.
We started by analysing these projects from the client’s perspective. We interviewed several star- tups that previously participated in the course. Additionally, we sent a survey to all clients from the previous two years. We incorporated the findings of the interviews and survey with literature. From this, we concluded that startups potentially suffer from a lack of design upfront. This can lead to the creation of an undesirable product. To address this, we developed and introduced a design thinking workshop to our course. Design Thinking is a method for problem analysis and problem-solving. We evaluated the workshop by interviewing teaching assistants who supervised student groups that had participated in the workshop. Additionally, we surveyed the students who participated in the workshop and teaching assistants who joined a test run of the workshop.
From the results of the interviews with startups and survey of previous clients, we synthesized di- mensions of success for projects with students. We found three dimensions in which startups measure the success of a project. The output of a project can be important to them in terms of the 1) product that is developed or what was 2) learned during the project. Additionally, whether students are successfully 3) recruited after the project can also be a consideration when assessing success. Furthermore, we synthesized dimensions of product success and preconditions to success in these projects. We found five dimensions of product success and five preconditions to success.
The design thinking workshop was given to students in the first week they started their project. It constituted half a day during which the students learned to apply the Design Sprint method, a method for operationalizing design thinking in a structured way.
After the projects ended, we evaluated the impact of the workshop. The students and their teaching assistants were both generally positive about it. The teaching assistants, who also supervised non- workshop groups, noticed an improved early process. Furthermore, they noticed that some of their non-workshop groups fell into traps that could have possibly been prevented if the group had joined the workshop and applied the tools. This leads us to believe that the workshop should be extended to all students in the course.
Implication for startups   Spend time thoroughly understanding the problem before engineering a costly and time-consuming prototype. A design sprint is a low-cost way to discover if the problem is sufficiently understood.
Implications for companies involved in SE project courses   If properly motivated, students can create a useful product or prototype, the project does not have to be just a recruitment exercise.
Implications for teachers (of SE project courses with external stakeholders)   Add a design sprint workshop for all students at the start of the course. This thesis shows that adding such a workshop is feasible and improves students’ early process.
Implications for students  Do a design sprint before formulating requirements; this will deepen the understanding of the problem to solve and improve the process, so that it yields a product that is more aligned with the user’s needs.
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Women are largely underrepresented in IT, girls’ interest in STEM and IT fields tends to drop throughout secondary education. Educational games are a great tool to change the perception of certain topics, as well as changing the behavior of the players. Thus, this report describes the development of a game to make the field of IT more appealing to girls between the ages of 10 and 14.

After collecting requirements with the client and doing a literature study a design is proposed. The final product is a two-player 2D Role-Playing-Game with puzzle elements, specifically designed to be played in a classroom environment. The game takes place in a data center and will show the players the societal importance of data centers as well as the diversity of the work in data centers. The gameplay consists of exploring a data center, talking with both male and female employees in various roles, helping them with their work through minigames, and solving a mystery. The game was designed to specifically cater to girls and to break stereotypes regarding women in IT.
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OKademy is a start-up that wants to improve the healthcare in the Netherlands by improving the process by which graduated medical students are being matched to a hospital team. This is needed since there is a lack of surgery
assistants, while graduate students need to wait on average six months to start their work in a hospital. To match quickly and sufficiently, the hard-skills as well as soft-skills of the student need to be known. To achieve this, universities need to provide OKademy with each student’s soft-skills. However, this takes an excessive amount of effort for the universities. To let the universities benefit from this idea, OKademy wants to have a system which keeps track of the soft-skills and matches students in groups for assignments, thus being beneficial for universities and hospitals. To help Okademy achieve its goal we developed a system that can be used by universities to help the students keep track of their soft-skills. The same system can be used to form theoretically well-functioning groups. These groups should be generated using an optimization algorithm that approximates the best groups regarding the soft-skills of students. In this system, students, referred to as ‘members’, and instructors, referred to as ‘hosts’, can register. Members can be assigned into groups and hosts can create or modify groups and courses accordingly. Members can, after registration, fill in their top 10 soft-skills with a corresponding automatized grade. Based on these skills, they will be assigned to groups for a course created by a host. A course will go through multiple phases. When all groups have completed the assignment, a member is able to give feedback to five random soft-skills of their group members and recommend a new one if desired. Based on this feedback, their soft-skill grades will be adjusted. The possible combinations of groups can be extremely large, therefore, it is not feasible to blindly search for the best group formation. Our algorithm will use the idea of genetic algorithms to explore the search space and approximate the best group formation. The the final product consists of a web application in which the multi-objective group formation optimization algorithm is implemented. To work in a structured manner, we used the Scrum method. Meetings with our client and coach were held every week. The system has been tested by functionality tests, user tests and unit tests, ensuring a functional system. OKademy will use this system in collaboration with universities and hospitals to solve the problem. ... Read more

This report is a document that presents the project Estimating landing time based on historical data. We want to succeed in designing and implementing a system based on requirements posed by our client AerLabs. The main goal we are researching is whether we can accurately predict the landing time and runway
of arriving flights at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport (AMS). For an end-user to interact with these predictions and flight’s information, a graphical user interface needed to be developed. ... Read more

Almende B.V., a technologically innovative and research-oriented company, has been working on a new algorithm that optimizes routes for parcel delivery trucks. The algorithm contains novel features, like including the possible use of autonomous vehicles, that are at this moment in time not taken into account in existing route optimization algorithms and thus visualization applications. To this end and to get a more tangible overview of the algorithm’s behavior and performance, they requested to have a customized visualization tool developed. This report describes the process and results of developing such a tool. The tool is presented as a single-page application and has been partly depicted on the cover of this document. The goal of the project is to have a more clear overview of the routing algorithm’s capabilities, by showing its unique features on a map and displaying statistics on the side. In addition, comparing the algorithm to existing ones should provide added insights into the (expected) benefits of the new algorithm. The main purpose of the tool developed in this project is to show insight into the workings of the algorithm and to help with enhancing and developing the algorithm. An added side-bonus is that the tool can also be used to show the performance to various groups of interested parties. ... Read more