Faculty Leaders
Classes
- CS 110: Principles of Web Development (4 units)
- CS 175: Entrepreneurship in Computing (4 units)
This program will integrate two upper-division courses Web Development (CS110) and Entrepreneurship in Computing (CS175) to create a program introducing students to what it's like to create or work at an early-stage startup. Web Development (CS110) is primarily concerned with methods to create well-crafted, tested, and documented websites and services that can be easily extended and scaled to meet future needs. The students will learn about everything necessary to create and deploy modern websites and services including tools, frameworks, patterns, and methods. Additionally, they learn industry-standard project management tools such as GitHub and Kanban boards to track their groups' progress through feature identification and specification, development, testing, and deployment as well as bug identification, tracking, and patching.
Entrepreneurship in Computing (CS175) focuses on teaching the skills necessary to create a technology business such as ideation strategies, business model canvas generation, customer discovery, market validation, development of a minimum viable product (MVP), and product-market validation. The business side of this course teaches the students how to use customer discovery to identify their customers and the features that they truly need so the team is able to develop a product that solves a problem for their target customers. This process includes speaking with potential customers, "failing" rapidly, and learning from those "failures" to develop a better product. These skills are essential for any good manager as well as any good engineer. In addition to the business side of the course, the students form teams and develop an MVP, as identified by their customer discovery process. The final deliverable of the course is a mock investor pitch and a demo of their MVP and the associated documentation.
The program proposed here will retain some of the lab components of CS110, but will focus primarily on an open-ended group project that will be proposed by the students to satisfy both the CS110 assignments and the CS175 MVP project. The students will form their own "startup" groups and propose a web-based system or service prior to arriving in the country and will then build an MVP for their proposed business. They will learn how to formulate user stories to describe/specify features during the first few days abroad and utilize these skills to set up milestones for their project. This integration of the two courses will reinforce the lessons from CS110 as students will see these methods applied to their own real-life project that has "customers" and a business prospect. While it will still be a "smaller project" as far as real-world web systems are concerned, because it is an MVP with a real-world application, the students will be able to see how the foundation in modern web development and software practices sets a framework for maintainable and extensible systems. In addition to the integration of the two courses discussed above, teaching this course abroad provides additional opportunities to enhance student learning experiences. Costa Rica has been hailed as the "Silicon Valley of Latin America" and boasts a number of large technology companies opening offices in San Jose. One of the top technology universities in Latin America (Costa Rica Institute of Technology) is just outside San Jose, and the city has been developing the technology sector as one of the fastest-growing technology economies.
Finally, we hope to partner with the entrepreneurial ecosystems both abroad in San Jose and locally in Riverside. In San Jose, we will have speakers from the local startup ecosystem give talks about their own startup journey. Back in Riverside, we hope to partner with local resources such as 3 UCR's own ExCITE incubator, to provide students with the opportunity to continue with their projects after the program has ended if they choose to or to simply continue their journey in the exciting world of startups.
This program has closed as of March 2024 and is no longer taking applications. Please stay posted for this program in Summer 2025, to South Korea.
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