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Capstone Project Abstracts

Honors students have completed Capstone Projects in a wide range of subjects and topics. Listed below are some sample abstracts from past Honors Capstone Projects.

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Bradley Hoppes

Class of 2002
Black Powder Combustion:

  This project involves studying the characteristics of amounts of a black powder charge behind a projectile vs. the velocity of that projectile. By comparing velocity vs. propellant amounts of published measurements and fitting that data; an equation was derived that allowed for more accurate velocity predictions and better data fits. 

Aaron Campbell

Class of 2002
National Language Processing and Natural Language Translation
  The implementation of a natural language translation program requires the parsing of natural language sentences. Parsing a natural language sentence can be done with a sophisticated chart-parsing algorithm. This algorithm should extract multiple parse trees in order to eliminate syntactic ambiguity. The production of a parse tree is necessary for semantic analysis and translation. 

  A parse tree analysis algorithm should be used to descend the parse tree and retrieve information about the phrase structures of the source sentence. Analysis of the parse tree will yield a knowledge base from which a translation may be acquired. A dictionary must be implemented in order to translate words from the source language to the target language.

Jessica Kelly

Class of 2002

Underachievement Syndrome in the Secondary School Setting
This research project is an attempt to define what underachievement syndrome is, how to identify students who fall into this category, and what teachers can do to rehabilitate students who suffer from underachievement. The review of literature on the topic may guide future teachers in helping students who may fall below their ability level. Conclusions will be drawn about the effectiveness of the approaches to rehabilitate underachievers.

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