Same here. We had to design and write a significant real-world application. You could suggest your own idea or take on a project that the profs had found through their connections with the business world. Either way, you had to convince the professors on the committee that it was worthy of receiving a full course's worth of credit (though most people wound up spending far more than that amount of time on it).

We had that at my community college too, we worked along with an government organization to produce software for them. Unfortunately most of our coursework involved writing documentation and doing presentations, so the software side of things wasn't as useful as it should have been.