A team of senior engineering students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln developed a solution to make cutting-edge interactive television technology more accessible. For their Senior Capstone Project, they designed a custom onscreen content guide for viewers in Omaha to navigate our NextGen TV channel.
“All students graduating from UNL’s School of Computing are required to go through our one-year, two semester capstone program called Senior Design,” said UNL’s Senior Design Project Manager Melanie Kugler-Wright.
Kugler-Wright says students review and rank their preferences on about 30 possible projects. The students assigned to our NextGen TV project integrated features such as a large on-demand video library for programming, live streaming, access to our two radio channels and social media, as well as public safety information and weather alerts.
“There are alerts if there's a tornado warning or a severe thunderstorm warning. We wanted that to be a key component so that we were providing the safety features that Nebraska Public Media wanted,” explained Maxwell Kline, one of the team’s student application developers who spoke during a showcase presentation.
UNL Assistant Director for Capstone Christopher Bohn explained that students learn to work on largescale projects outside of a traditional classroom, applying engineering practices. “We expect students to be able to communicate with a variety of technical and non-technical audiences, and regular meetings with the project’s stakeholders give them the opportunity to demonstrate this,” said Bohn.
Kline said he and the other members of the student team conducted thorough testing so they could deliver a quality product. “Without this project I know that I wouldn't be in the position that I am now. I learned a lot of technical and soft skills,” said Kline.
View the original article on the Nebraska Public Media website.
