Guide Lines 4 Students W.r

GUIDELINES FOR STUDENTS FINAL YEAR INDIVIDUAL MAIN PROJECT 1. INTRODUCTION An important element of the final year of your undergraduate course is a main individual project. This is an open-ended, investigative activity spread over most of your final year and carries a large fraction of the total marks. The project is supervised by an academic member of staff and is normally conducted within that staff member’s research Section. 2. SETTING UP AN INDIVIDUAL PROJECT Projects can be experimental, computer-based or analytical or any combination of these. All projects should have a strong engineering content and employ skills acquired in previous years of the Mechanical Engineering course. They may also involve non-technological aspects such as economics, safety and ecological implications. There are two main ways the project can be arranged. (a) “Open” Projects Many projects originate from staff members who send me brief descriptions before the beginning of the Summer term in the (Academic) year before the project commences. Descriptions will be posted on the walls of level 7 (North end) and on the Department’s web site on Friday 7th May 2004 or shortly thereafter. You should look for projects which suit your interests and abilities, contact the members of staff listed on the description sheets and then decide on a shortlist of four projects from which you will carry out one. (See section 6 “Useful Hints”.) Don’t be afraid to approach a member of staff with a suggestion for a project if he or she has not actually offered one that you like. (See section 2(b).) When you have decided on your four projects, you should fill in the “Individual Project Choice Form” Section C. Fill in the titles of the projects and the names of the corresponding supervisors in the order of your choice. Return the form to the Undergraduate Office by Friday 28th May 2004. You should not nominate more than two projects from a single supervisor. The Department will allocate one of your chosen projects to you, giving you your first choice where possible but allowing supervisors to choose if more than one student wants a particular project. You will be informed which project has been allocated to you at the beginning of the Autumn Term.

(b) Reserved Projects

It is also possible for students (or their sponsoring companies) to play a much greater role in devising their projects than the above. This might be the case if you or your sponsor has a particular interest within Mechanical Engineering, which you wish to pursue in a project or if you simply do not like any of the staff-originated projects on offer. In this case, you should identify a member of staff with interests in the field in which you want to work. (Consult the List of Staff Interests included with the project descriptions.) Discuss your ideas with him or her and then fill in part A (if a sponsoring company is involved) or part B of the attached Individual Project Choice Form. Get your proposed supervisor to sign to indicate his or her agreement to supervise the project. Whichever route is followed, the Individual Project Choice Form must be submitted to the Undergraduate Office on or before 28th May 2004 with Parts A or B or C completed. You are advised to keep copies of this form. 3. PLANNING THE PROJECT Your first task, at the very beginning of the Academic year, will be to complete a “Project Definition Form”. Your supervisor will help you with this. You will have to agree some objectives for the task and to obtain the signatures of the associate supervisor and the head of the research section taking responsibility for your project. Your project is a big task, spanning the whole of your Final Year. Initially it may seem simple to accomplish because the deadline for completion is so far away. This is misleading. Unless you plan your activities and apportion your time on the project right from the beginning you will run out of time and achieve very little. It is essential that you draw up a plan. This can be quite simple, in network, bar chart form etc. (see example in appendix A). You should set yourself milestones to reach by certain dates - e.g. literature search completed, initial rig design, preliminary experiments, so that you will realise if things are slipping out of control. Your work may deviate from this plan during the time of the project, perhaps because of delays or because new insights that the work brings up changes the focus of your activities. Therefore, at the outset, you should set two or three dates when you and your supervisor intend to sit down together and thoroughly review the project's progress.

4. ASSESSMENT

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Seven aspects of your project are assessed to obtain your overall project mark; Conduct of task Project Plan Report Progress Report Log Book Oral Presentation. Final Report Of these, the Final Report carries over 50% of the total available marks. The three project reports should be submitted to the Undergraduate Office before 4.00 pm on the deadline dates which will be published at the beginning of the Autumn Term. Late submissions will be penalised. Each report should have an appropriate 3M or 4M Coursework cover sheet, obtainable from the Undergraduate Office. The Project Plan and Progress Reports will be marked and returned to you by your Supervisor. They should be returned to the UG Office with the Final Report in June. Only one copy of the Project Plan and Progress Reports should be handed in but you must submit two identical copies of the Final Report to the UG Office for marking, one of which will subsequently be returnable to you. Your Log Book should be handed in with these two Final Report copies, and also the previously marked Project Plan and Progress Reports (preferably all joined together with a strong rubber band). (a) Conduct of Task Your project supervisor and assistant supervisor award some marks for how effectively and conscientiously you set about your project work. (b) Project Plan Report This is a very short (2 to 3 page) report submitted in November. It should contain: (i) a title page and index (ii) a brief scene-setting introduction to the context of the project (iii) a clear statement of the project's objectives (iv) a project plan in some appropriate diagrammatic form with milestones (see e.g. appendix A). (v) a copy of your personal timetable indicating the times you have allocated to working on the project. (You are expected to spend 1-2 half days in the Autumn term, 3-4 half days in the Spring term and the whole time between the 4M examinations and the project final report submission deadline). The project plan report need not contain any information as to the progress of the project. (c)

Progress Report This is a short (typically 3 to 6 page) report submitted towards the beginning of February 3

describing the progress of the project to date. It should include: (i) A title page (ii) A summary (iii) An index (iv) A introduction and background to the area of work of the project (v) A description of each of the main achievements to date (literature survey, rig design, analysis etc.) Include at least some examples of the results you have obtained to date. (vi) A statement of how the achievements to date match (or fail to match) the original plan and an indication of the main barriers to progress (vii) A statement of future work and, if necessary, a revised plan (viii) Conclusions (ix) References (x) Figures The original project plan should be contained in an Appendix and referred to where appropriate. (d)

Log Book Throughout your project you should keep a project log book. This should be a hard cover, bound, A4-sized notebook in which you record all the details of your project work. It is essentially a diary of your project activity. Each time you work on the project you should note the date and record relevant activity (thoughts, analysis, telephone numbers/addresses, references, sketches, experimental data). You can also stick in computer output, graphs etc. Log books are routinely kept in industry and their primary aims are (i) the keep all the work on a project together (to avoid scraps of paper that get lost and so that the project can be completed by someone else in the event of illness), (ii) to provide a record of work which can be used as legal evidence of when work was done (e.g. in patent disputes), (iii) to record reasons why decisions were made, for future reference. During the project you should show your log book to your supervisor or second supervisor at the end of each month and have him sign it. At the end of the project, when you hand in the final report to the UG Office you should also hand your log book. Some marks will be awarded for the how effectively you keep your log book. Note that marks will not be awarded for neatness: a log book does not have to be tidy or beautiful, just legible and useful.

(e)

Project Presentation Four successive days of project seminars will be held in June. During this period you will give a 15-25 minute oral presentation of your project work to a small group of (typically 10-15) staff and students. You should discuss this presentation with your supervisor well in advance and, if possible, try to organise a private rehearsal.

(f)

Project Final Report 4

This is a full report of the project work and two, identical copies must be submitted to the Undergraduate Office. Examples of highly-marked past reports are held in the MED library. The Main Report should not be more than 50 pages long, including appendices. The line spacing in text should be set to 1.5 and the font, to Times New Roman, 12 point, or to a similar size. (Do not be misled by the fact that some of the examples in the MED library may be longer than this: they may have written before thes limits were introduced.) This is a MAXIMUM; a final report of 20-40 pages will probably be fine. You should discuss the structure and content of all your reports with your supervisor before submitting them. 4M students should use the special light and dark green covers provided for each copy of the report. 3M students should use the standard Coursework front covers. Marks may also be awarded to allow for difficulties, not of your making, encountered during the project. 5.

PLAGIARISM

The College regulations on plagiarism have recently been greatly strengthened and if any plagiarism is detected in your project, this will probably lead to your failing to be awarded a degree. This includes the incorporation of unattributed information or text from the world wide web or the use of text from another student’s project report. The simple rule is always to reference any material you use in your reports (see Appendix B) and, if using the actual text from any source, to put it in inverted commas and say where it came from. 6.

USEFUL HINTS

(a)

Do not rely too much on others - your project supervisor or your company. The only person over whose activity (or lack of activity) you have full control is yourself.

(b)

Be (diplomatically) pushy to get the help and resources you need.

(c)

Stick your project plan on your wall and check regularly to see if you are falling behind. Think about what could go wrong or cause delay (“Risk Assessment”) and make back-up plans (“Risk Management”).

(d)

Spend about 1 to 2 half days per week in the first term, 3 to 4 half days per week in the second term working on your project (plus thinking time, see (h) below). Although you will have some time between the exams and the final report submission date to finish off the project, do not rely heavily on this; it is too short a time for you to overcome any unforeseen delays or problems that may arise at this stage. College facilities and 5

personnel become very busy during this period which is best reserved for writing and polishing the final report. (e)

Do as much as you can, especially in assembling any equipment and ordering long lead items, early in the Autumn Term.

(f)

Sketch out the likely layout/contents of your final report now, before you start to do much. It concentrates the mind on what is needed.

(g)

During the progress of the task, prepare for the seminar and main report, i.e. take photographs of prototypes, prepare relevant slides etc. It is often easier to do this whilst the project progresses than after you have finished practical work.

(h)

Finally, THINK about your project. Do not expect to simply turn up in the laboratory now and then and take up where you left off. Try to use some of your spare time thinking about the project; perhaps when you are walking to College or having a bath! It is as such times that you will be able to have new ideas and to see your project most clearly.

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APPENDIX A

PROJECT PLAN

(This is a very simple and non-specific example. Yours should be more detailed)

NOV

DEC JAN

FEB MAR APR MAY JUN

Literature Search Rig Design Rig Manufacture Develop Transducer Preliminary Testing Main Test Work Analysis of Results Report Preparation 1 A

2,3 B

4 C

D

Milestones 1. 2. 3. 4.

Literature search completed and written in preliminary form. Test rig designed and manufactured. Transducer system built and tested. Test rig fully operational.

A,B,C,D Formal meetings timetabled with project supervisor (2 hours allocated in his diary).

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APPENDIX B

REFERENCES

It is very important that your Final Report contains a literature review citing papers and other publications relevant to your project work. (This is needed both to enhance the value of your work to readers by putting it in the context of previous work and also to avoid any possible charge of plagiarism.) There are many different ways of citing and listing references. Most are acceptable, but the most important things are (i) that the reference be complete enough to enable another person to locate easily the publication concerned (ii) that you be consistent. Just to confuse matters, the layout of a book reference is often slightly different from one for a paper. Two common types of citation and listing are exemplified below, but do not hesitate to adopt alternatives if they are already widely used. (a)

By number

Give all references a number and cite the number where appropriate in the text. The references must be numbered in order of appearance, e.g. “…The concept of boundary lubrication was first developed by Hardy and Doubleday [3] but greatly extended by the work of Bowden and Tabor [4] who, …” Then, list the references, for papers and books respectively: (3) Hardy, W.B. and Doubleday, I. "Boundary Lubrication, - The Paraffin Series." Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. A100, (1922), pp. 550-757. (4) F. P. Bowden and D Tabor, The Friction and Lubrication of Solids. Part I, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964. (b)

By name and year

Cite name of author(s) followed by the year of publication. (If two references have both the same author and year, use a, b etc., after the year, e.g. Hardy (1992a)). The references then appear in the list at the end, in alphabetical order of first author (and for several publications by a given order, in order of year), e.g. “The concept of boundary lubrication was first developed by Hardy (1922), but greatly extended by the work of Bowden and Tabor (1964), who, …” The references are now listed: F. P. Bowden and D Tabor, (1964), The Friction and Lubrication of Solids. Part I, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

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Hardy, W.B. and Doubleday, I., (1922) "Boundary Lubrication, - The Paraffin Series." Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. A100, pp. 550-757. The name/year referencing method is particularly well suited to longer documents, since new references can easily be inserted without having to renumber all the following ones.

References versus bibliography You should recognize the difference between References and Bibliography.

References are specifically referred to or “cited” in the text of your report A Bibliography is a list of publications which are not specifically referred to in order to support a statement in your review but which provide useful general reading about the subject of concern. You might consider having both a Bibliography and a list of References in your Final report.

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