Resources facilitating international capstone experiences

Today it is very common for software systems to be built by teams located in more than one country. For example, a project team may be located in Australia while the team lead resides in the US. Senior design or capstone projects offer students real-world hands-on experience but rarely while working internationally. One reason is that most instructors do not have international business contacts that allow them to find project sponsors in other countries. Another reason is the fear of having to invest a huge amount of time managing an international project. This paper presents two resources to help universities expand international experiences for students. The first is a methodology for how to manage student teams while tracking individual contributions/performance and the second is a platform where a university can apply to be paired with a university in a different country for a project exchange. We start by introducing the general concepts related to "International Capstone Project Exchanges", the basic model behind the exchanges (student teams work from their home university while being mentored by an industry sponsor residing in a different country) and several alternate models that have been used in practice. We also describe templates/processes used in evaluations of individual team members. The paper concludes with a detailed description of an International Capstone Project Exchange (ICPE) platform that has been developed to aid any university in establishing their own international project exchange