Project Report Outline


General Comments

I'm often asked how long the reports need to be in this course. This is a difficult question to answer, as it depends how many figure/snapshots etc. are included in the report. As a rough guide, between 6-12 pages would be about right. Two pages, for example, would definitely be too short! But if you find yourself writing more than this, that's fine also. You obviously really got into your project!!

On the topic of using the first person or not (i.e., I and We), this is allowed for the COMPX241 reports. Note, in later stages of your degree you will be expected to adopt a more formal academic writing style, where there are stricter constraints, such as second/third person, past-tense.

The main sections your report should look to provide are the standard ones used for a project write-up: Introduction, Background, Implementation, Conclusion. A more nuanced version of how to achieve this is detailed in the Questions to answer below. The Background section relates to previous work, which in your case is likely to be the libraries and APIs you have built upon to develop your work. In the Conclusion it is natural to reflect upon what you have done.

Group report outline (can also be applied to the individual report)

Project name, group members

Executive summary: Include details that give an overview of the project

Questions to answer

What were the goals of your project?

What makes this project valuable/interesting/motivating?

What was your approach to achieving the goals?

What work by others is related to this project?

What results were achieved?

What lessons did you learn from your project experience?

What recommendations do you have for future work in this area?

References/Bibliography

What to hand in

Your final grade for the group project is comprised from three parts: a group mark as assessed through a group report (34%), and an individual mark as assessed through a personal report (50%), and your group presentation (16%).

The individual report should summarise the work you have done, explain how you designed the code you wrote and mention any strengths or weaknesses it is known to have. You may wish to use some of the topics outlined for the group report as inspiration for your individual report as many are equally applicable here also. Submit your reports through the COMPX241 Moodle site. There are separate hand-in entries for the individual and group reports. for the group report, only one from the team needs to do this.

You also need to submit the code the team has developed. If you have used an external code repository site, such as GitHub or BitBucket, then probably the simplest way to proceed is to add me into your project there. If linking me in through a Google Sign In, my account name is [email protected] (not [email protected] which is an alias, and so results in login failure). My username on GitHub and BitBucket is 'davidbwaikato'.