Capstone · Step 1

Capstone Proposal

Say what you're building before you build it

Grades 7 to 12
Time About one class period to draft
Difficulty Varies, it's your project

Every capstone starts on this page. Before you touch a robot, a laser cutter, or a single line of code for your own project, you write down what you're actually building and how you'll know it's done. That's not busywork standing between you and the fun part. Students who skip it are the ones who discover in week three that they built the wrong thing, or three times as much of the right thing as they had time for. Fifteen minutes here buys you weeks later.

What you'll learn

How to scope a project so it actually fits the time you have
How to sort features into Must, Should, Could, and Won't, so you stop over-promising before you start
How to plan backward from your deadline instead of guessing forward from today

What you need

An idea. Not a finished one, a direction. This page sharpens it.
The four tracks below.
The proposal template linked in your Schoology assignment.

Pick your track

Every track builds on skills you already have from class. You're not starting from zero.

Track	Builds on
Robotics & Competition	RoboMaster programming, micro:bit
Product & Fabrication	3D printing and design, laser cutting
Software	AI chatbots, vibe coding, Flutter, Raspberry Pi web development
Media & Documentation	Recording and explaining what the other three tracks are doing

Media is a real track, not a fallback. The content has to be accurate, and you have to be able to defend it, same standard the class already sets for AI use.

Two or more skills

Combine two or more skills from class. One is fine if you're pushing it somewhere genuinely hard, not just using it, but doing something with it that took real problem-solving.

A robot choreographed to music and a robot that just drives forward both "use RoboMaster." Only one of those is hard.

Scope it: the part that saves you

Almost every project that runs out of time ran out of time because nobody wrote down what could be cut. Sort your idea into four buckets before you start building.

Bucket	What it means
Must have	The smallest version that still counts as finished. If you only get this far, you pass.
Should have	What makes it good, not just working.
Could have	Nice if there's time. First thing added, last thing missed.
Won't have this time	Something you're deliberately skipping. Naming it now means nobody expects it later, including you.

Try sorting one

A student proposes a two-week tic-tac-toe app. Which of these belongs in Must have?

Your own Must list should feel almost too small. That's correct, not a failure. Should and Could are where the ambition lives.

Plan backward

Most people plan forward from today and run out of runway. Planning backward from your deadline works better, because it forces the question that matters: what has to already be true one week before you're done?

When	What has to be true
Final week	Working, tested, ready to show
One week before	Everything's built. Only polish left
Two weeks before	Your Must list is done and running
Week 1	Whatever you need has arrived, and something is already running, even if it's ugly

Checkpoint: your timeline names something true at each point, not just a list of tasks.

Materials, if you need any

Most projects run entirely on what's already in the lab. If yours needs something specific, a sensor, a print that takes hours, a certain size of acrylic, name it in your proposal now. That's the difference between it being ready when Build starts and you losing a week waiting on it.

If you run out of time

Say, right now, what the first thing you'd cut is, and what version still works without it. You already answered most of this in your Won't-have list. This just makes sure it's the right thing to cut when it actually happens.

Need a starting point?

Track	Ideas
Robotics & Competition	Design a challenge nobody in class has run yet: parallel park, cup carry, an autonomous duel
Product & Fabrication	Tinkercad Projects, Instructables
Software	What past students built, Raspberry Pi Tutorials, Pi My Life Up
Media & Documentation	Follow another track's build from start to finish, or write a how-to good enough that a stranger could follow it

A local problem is usually a better starting point than a generic one: something in the lab, at school, or on St. Croix that actually bothers you.

What you turn in

The filled proposal template, uploaded as a PDF or DOCX. Not a shared link, the file itself.
Every section answered specifically, not with generic filler
A Must-have list that's realistic for the time you actually have

The full rubric lives in Schoology, in the Capstone folder, so you can check it any time.

Vocabulary

Term	What it means
Scope	What's actually inside a project, as opposed to everything you could imagine adding to it
MVP	Minimum viable product: the smallest version that still does the job
Must / Should / Could / Won't	A way to sort features by how essential they are, so a project has a real floor and an honest ceiling
Iteration	Building a rough version first, then improving it, instead of trying to get it perfect on the first attempt

When it goes wrong

I don't know what to build.

Pick a track first, then think about a problem you've actually noticed, in the lab, at school, or on St. Croix. A real annoyance beats a generic idea every time.

My Must-have list is basically the whole project.

Cut harder. Ask what the absolute smallest version is that still does the one thing you said it would do. Everything else moves to Should or Could.

I want to do more than one track.

Pick the track your core idea lives in. You can still use skills from other tracks, that's normal, the track is about where the bulk of the work happens.

I'm not sure my idea uses two skills.

Talk to Mr. Krigger before you submit. It's much easier to adjust scope now than after you've started building.