On April 30, final-year students in Conestoga’s Web Design and Development program demonstrated capstone projects to the college community and industry guests at a year-end virtual showcase.
Students Prachi Bansal, Shubham Gupta and Jeenal Shah developed a web-based application to categorize Tweets related to COVID-19 through sentiment analysis as a capstone project.
Projects centred on complete, responsive, data-driven web-based and Android applications that brought together skills developed throughout the program for a feature-rich and compelling design. Students focused on providing solutions to problems of interest, including simplifying e-commerce, connecting to rideshare opportunities, and helping individuals find community services.
“This has been a two-year journey like no other,” said Scott Dart, chair of Workforce Development, in his address to students. “I’m hoping you realize how resilient you all are and how your abilities have changed without you probably even knowing it. Working in a different environment that’s online and having to do group work when you might not even be in the same town, and being able to make that work and build these types of capstones, is a new dynamic that will serve you very well in your future careers.”
Students Prachi Bansal, Shubham Gupta and Jeenal Shah developed a web-based application to categorize Tweets related to COVID-19 through sentiment analysis. Through function components like AJaxcall, PHP and python, the application takes datasets uploaded by users and generates a report that identifies text as negative, neutral or positive.
With an increased reliance on social media to receive and communicate information, the group said they were interested in exploring natural language processing and text analysis to help support tactics for government response and public health initiatives related to COVID-19. In addition to technology that allows for sorting data, the project also features a user-friendly front-end that employs design components such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Other projects included a bookstore website, an instant messaging application, and a news aggregator. Video demonstrations of all capstone projects are available to view online.
Conestoga’s Web Design and Development graduate certificate program in the School of Workforce Development, Continuing Education & Online Learning is designed to provide hands-on, comprehensive training to work in the field of web-centric business application development. The program focuses on user-centered design supported by extensive back-end programming and front-end use of graphic design, multimedia, video, animation and e-commerce applications to facilitate fully functional websites. Students apply human interface guidelines, standard-based structures, and design and development principles to create accessible, usable and captivating web experiences geared to today’s market.