Practicums

The AD B.A.S. program includes four practicum courses, where students use previous classroom experience to build larger group-based projects. Students work with client organizations to develop web applications, mobile applications, cloud computing services, and data science practicum projects. Past practicum projects have included include dynamic web applications for use by non-profit organizations, a cross-platform mobile application for a property management company, and cloud service infrastructure for a telecommunications startup.

Practicum projects are designed to ensure that students experience real-world, practical applications of the concepts and tools learned in previous courses. Students store and share code via a version control system and utilize small-team agile strategies. Students are expected to write requirements documents, build the application in iterative stages and integrate the components into the larger group project.

Interested in being a client? Find out more information here.

Testimonials

"Our nonprofit has been helping people in Federal Way with emergency services such as rent assistance, free community meals, bus tickets, and gas vouchers for over 30 years. Client applications, records keeping, and reports have all been paper based. Our board asked if we could digitize our application forms, populate a database, automate qualification checking and report generation. North Seattle College’s web application practicum class enthusiastically offered to take on this project! Two groups of students quickly familiarized themselves with our application forms, qualification rules, and reporting requirements and in just a few weeks presented a working prototype to our organization. Our client interviewers were overjoyed by the proposals and could see how they could streamline our processes, possibly enabling us to help more families. We were impressed by the depth of the student’s knowledge of web-based tools and database creation, their positive energy, professionalism, planning, engagement with our stakeholders, their presentation skills, and their help to get it up and running.”
---Howard W. Stolz

“The Spring class of 2018 did a [practicum] project for my company PopSmartKids, an edtech company that is reimagining screen time for kids. The students helped build a website that would serve as a landing page for the products and services provided by the company. The students quickly organized themselves in teams and paid attention to the individual skill sets of each member so that they could provide the maximum value for my company. They focused on listening to my requirements, change requests and feedback for the work. All throughout the project they maintained open channels of communication and kept me updated with the progress. At the final presentation one of the teams went above and beyond in bringing their A-game to the table - in offering a product that was customizable, user-friendly and had adequate documentation to support future work.”
--Priyanka Raha, Founder & CEO, PopSmartKids

“I was fortunate to work with a group of very motivated and hard working students who really cared and took the time to understand the ultimate goal of my project which is to provide children with disabilities and their families access to information about activities in their communities that will benefit their overall health and well-being. Not only did the students learn the technical aspects of application development but more importantly they learned how to translate what they are doing to a language that can be understood by all. A solid relationship was built between myself and the students such that the students plan to, as best they can, help me take the project to completion. I couldn't ask for a better outcome.”
--Cheryl Kerfeld