Now that you've learned a core skill, you're ready to build an amazing project!
The capstone project is one of the most important pieces of landing the perfect LaunchCode apprenticeship. This project will be one of the biggest ways that the LaunchCode evaluation team will verify that you're job-ready, and it should be something that you're proud to show off to a potential employer in an interview. So don't skimp on the time, energy, and thought that you put into this!
This is your opportunity to be unique, innovative and creative. This should be project that you conceived on your own and executed from start to finish. If you plan to use a project that you worked on with a group or at a bootcamp class, please come to the interview prepared to articulate the specific functions that you designed and programmed. We look for for projects that:
- Demonstrate marketable skills: You have strong foundation in one of the languages from the skills milestone, and the related tools and best practices.
- Demonstrate your ability to learn new things: You've gone beyond your initial learning to teach yourself something new. Maybe you learned Angular.js for your front-end web project, or customized the UI components of your mobile project.
- Demonstrate utility for a company: In order to land that perfect job, a prospective employer will want to know that even as a relatively new programmer, you're capable of creating high-quality work for them.
Put your project up in GitHub. This will make it accessible for others to view, and will show off all of hard work you put into it as you rack up commits!
Here are some project ideas, along with potential features to get you started. You don't have to choose one of these; in fact, if you have another idea that you're passionate about, go for it! These project ideas are meant to give you an idea of the type and scale of projects that LaunchCode is looking for, along with giving practical project ideas that any learner at this level can tackle.
Regardless of the project you tackle, your project should:
- Build an application entirely yourself, or nearly so. If you use “starter code" or a group project, you need to go well beyond what's already there, and be able to clearly articulate what you built yourself versus what was built or provided by others.
- Include 3-5 killer features. The example projects will give you an idea of what constitutes a solid feature. Adding a new button to your web project? Probably not significant to count as a feature. Adding user login to your project? Yep, that's great!
- In your chosen language and platform, create a single view application
- Required: IOS (Swift, Objective-C) or Android (Java)
- Add additional pages (i.e. multiple views) and integrate 3 or more default classes
- Required: Database frameworks and iOS UI classes (UITableView and UITableViewCell, UITextField, etc.) or Android UI classes
- Customize User Interface (UI) by editing default parameters
- Required: Change colors and shapes
- Optional: Add custom icons, games and animations (via Photoshop, SpriteKit, etc.)
- Integrate at least 1 built-in phone features
- Required: camera, accelerometer or other default app (e.g. contacts, texts, maps, etc.)
* Feature 1 - Database for location information
* Feature 2 - Access built-in map app or another map API
* Feature 3 - Pin locations
* Feature 1 - Database for users
* Feature 2 - User profile with contacts
* Feature 3 - Chat interface
* Feature 4 - Notifications
* Feature 5 - Access to camera or photos
* Feature 1 - Pick up GPS location
* Feature 2 - Time intervals for forecasts (e.g. hourly, daily, weekly, etc.)
* Feature 3 - Weather icons (e.g. rainy, sunny, cloudy, etc.)
* Feature 4 - Notifications
The time to complete your project will may vary quite a bit from our estimate of 150 hours. You should focus on making a great product, and on hitting the objects listed above. In addition, as you go through the LaunchCode application process, our evaluation team may have some suggestions on how to make your project even better.