Purpose:

You are at some stage of your project investigation and to help that stay on track this week I'm asking for a full report of the early part of the project. The intent is to get the structure of your final report established and get you to tidy up the details that you have worked on thus far. Depending on the details of the project this stage of your project report may be more focused on the documentation of the physical object you are building or may be more focused on the coding/modeling you are doing.

Why is it a Spherical Report?

It might be unreasonable to assume that everyone knows the story of the 'spherical cow' so here is the wiki documentation of the traditional spherical cow story. Yes, I know, there is also an episode of Big Bang Theory where it also comes up. More importantly here is a nice discussion of why this idea of a spherical cow (in a vacuum) is so central to physics. Your spherical cow is that simplest model you've been embedding in your project documents along with a basic iterative representation of that model.

Procedure:  

1) In looking around for reasonable guidelines for writing engineering/technical reports you will not be surprised that there is a lot of variation. The guide linked here was originally developed at the University of Connecticut though I found it as a resource for a Math Modeling couse at UC Berkeley. One of it's values is that is is pretty short and sweet and has a large set of examples in the appendices. I don't intend for you to read it all now but it will be handy to have as a resource in the future. For this class I want you to read through the first 4 pages or so and adapt your Jupyter notebooks to follow this recommended format as closely as possible. [the pdf].

2) Abstract: Recognize that the abstract you write for this week will change as you continue on the project but I was to see what you think that abstract says at this point[new].

3) Introduction: This is where you explain why this project interests you and what deeper understanding you will have upon completion. This is also the place to explain why this project adds value to the world [from project proposal].

4) Theory/Resources: This is where you explore resources you have found for your project as well as the broad outlines of how you are approaching the problem. This is where you lay out the simplest model including clearly presenting the math for that simplest version of the project.Then articulate your current understanding of how you intend to dig deeper into this project to unlock new understandings. Where is the more complicated model going? There may be some lack of clarity in your mind about this just now but get the basic framework of the writing done [mostly from project proposal, references/resources, and simplification labs - maybe a little coding but not necessarily].

5a) Experiment(models)/Procedure: This section is where you present the actual implementation of your simple version of the project, and eventually the more complex one. Take the time to be sure that you have explained your code or experimental object clearly and that you have thought about useful plots that illustrate the results of that simple model. Even though this is where the code will be presented there should be as much verbal explanation as code [new].

5b) Results/Discussion: In many cases the expectation is that you wait to present your results and discussion until after you have presented your experimental efforts. In this case, because you are implementing a series of models or experiments it makes more sense include the results and discussion of each successive stage immediately after it is presented. This allows you naturally explain what you have learned thus far and what the next steps are. There is a reflective element to any such discussion where you are encouraged to pose questions that you currently have or concerns that you have. I am encouraging you to think of this project report as an actual engineering notebook where you are tracking your progress through the project [new].

6) Conclusions: This section will be left blank for now since you need to make a little more progress (probably) before you're ready to articulate any conclusions.

7) Acknowledgments: This is a chance to thank other students or folks who helped move this project forward. This is not the dedication at the front of the book where you thank you parents, your partner, and your kids for putting up with you while you wrote this report -- that's a different thing. In the future when someone is providing grant funding for your project this is where you acknowledge that funding source or your graduate advisor who has been paying you for your work on this project [new].

8) References: There may be more references that you will add but this is where you list all the resources and references that you have found that relate to your work. I have seen sections of textbooks referenced when they offer a clear description of a mathematical model you used [references lab].

 

Deliverables:

1) Assemble your notebooks to create a solid looking draft project report (pdf) that meets the above expectations and submit to the LMS.