Courses

Community in the classroom

Our undergraduate courses engage Community Needs Experts! Please email uwtcat@uw.edu for more information.

CSE 482A: Accessibility Capstone (Spring)

The Accessibility Capstone at the Paul G. Allen school focuses on the use of participatory design methods to address the needs of highly diverse populations. Students face the unique challenge of creating novel, practical technology solutions to address the needs of community members with disabilities who are the course Needs Experts. Needs Experts provide essential knowledge of the problem domain space and co-design with the groups throughout the 10-week project cycle. The course is designed to provide student teams the theory, structure and support allowing teams to work effectively within the community, while learning fundamental principles of disability theory, participatory design and iterative engineering. A subset of the projects are sustained for real world use by the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology. See our Accessibility Capstone Video.

CSE 495: Special Projects (Fall,Winter,Spring)

Interested in putting your skills towards making urban environments more accessible, engaging, inclusive communities? This VIP (vertically integrated project) course will provide hands-on experience with the ins and outs of creating polished, data-driven software, with opportunities to focus on geodata analytics, mobile app development, mobile civic engagement, mobile app data acquisition (sensors, etc), full-stack web development, human-centered design, and educational tools for civic engagement. We will spend the quarter working with university and government partners on innovative projects that harness data for improved services, as well as more efficient and effective interventions.

Who should apply: Graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in CS, transportation, civic education, data science, architecture, urban design, disability studies, rehabilitation and statistics. 

To apply, please send current transcript, whether you can commit two consecutive quarters and the reason for your interest in the course to uwtcat@uw.edu.

CSE 499 – Independent Research

Available for UW Seattle CSE majors to do reading and research in the field. Usable as a free elective, but it cannot be taken in place of a core course or Computer Science & Engineering senior elective. 499 can be a good way to experiment with a research project before committing to 9 credits of honors work or further graded research. Prerequisite: Permission of instructor. Credit/No credit.