Project report

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The purpose of this document is to support you in writing a good project report. This is very important as reporting and article writing is one of the main academic skills.

Concerning the evaluation of your student project the report is the only material that is presented to the external examiner before your oral defense, and it has a significant influence on your grading.

Consider using a report structure like the template below. This is not something you should do, it is only a suggestion.

• Front page
  • At least…
    • Project title
    • Project submission month and year.
    • Your name
    • “University of Southern Denmark” and name of center, department or faculty.
    • Maybe a picture, sketch or diagram from your project.

• Title page
  • Among other things…
    • Project title
    • Project period
    • Your name, email address etc.
    • Report type (e.g. Bachelor thesis)
    • Your education (e.g. Robotics)
    • “University of Southern Denmark” and name of center, department or faculty.
    • Names of supervisor(s)
    • Copyright and license statement for report and material in the electronic archive.

• Abstract
  • Maximum one page
  • Consider using 4 paragraphs following this template (without writing the titles)
    • Introduction
    • Materials and methods
    • Results and discussion
    • Conclusion and future work
• Abstract in Danish
• Reading guide
  • Maximum one page
• List of abbreviations
• Foreword
  • Personal foreword
• Table of content
  • Consider using numbers for chapters and sections, if you are using Latex, set the depth to eg. 3 or 4.
• Introduction
  • Background information
    • Helicopter perspective, what is the project all about? Give the outside reader at chance to understand the domain.
  • Problem statement
    • Wherein lies the problem? What will you try to solve?
  • Related work
    • During your literature search what did you find?
    • Your own or the research group's prior work if any?
  • Project aim or Hypothesis
    • How did you derive your project aim (engineering design process) or hypothesis which you are testing (scientific method) and how it connects to related work?

• Chapter 1
  • Meat and potato chapter, typically 2-4 chapters dividing your work into some logical structure.
  • Consider using a common template for sections in all the meat and potato chapters such as:
    • Introduction
    • Materials and methods
    • Results
    • Discussion
    • Conclusion

• Chapter n
• Discussion
• Summing up all the chapter 1 to n conclusions.
• Conclusion
• Maximum one page
  • In general focusing a lot on the discussion and concluding if the project hypothesis was met partly or fully.
  • Do not write anything that is not written elsewhere in the report.
  • Remember to describe future work at the end of the conclusion.
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of literature

• Appendix 1

• Appendix n

Consider beginning each chapter with 2-5 lines in italic describing what this particular chapter covers. Make sure that this is well aligned with your reading guide.

In general description of tests, the results hereof and a discussion of the results should fill equally much as the introduction and materials and methods. If you write a report where you document very detailed the development but leaves out all documentation of tests, then you have only half a report, you do the math what this will do to your grading…

A good rule of thumb: Whenever you have written one page you should consider including at least one illustraction, image, table etc. It is not always necessary but pages with only text are often not very descriptive, and at the same time the reader looses his or her concentration.

A masters thesis (30 ECTS) report from a single student should have a length no more than 50 pages plus maximum 15 pages of appendices. If you are two students working together, you can add 10 pages.

A bachelors thesis (15 ECTS) report from a single student should have a length no more than 25 pages plus maximum 10 pages of appendices. If you are two students working together, you can add 5 pages.

In case of groups consisting of two students please add 50% to the maximum lengths. The report length refer to manually written text pages from introduction to last page written. Title page, abstract, foreword and pages which are autogenerated (or could be autogenerated) do not count.

You will probably find that these limitations are rather strict, this is intentional because the report length should reflect the amount of work related to the ECTS points. Also your report has to be read thoroughly by the examiners, and the shorter the report the higher the probability that they read it carefully.

If you do go beyond the maximum length you will not be directly punished for this, but there is a very high risk that the quality of your report will be lower than if you stick to the maximum lengths (see the report editing section below).

You should also note that the defined lengths are maximum values. You may very well have a much better report with 5 pages less after a proper editing process (again see the report editing section below).

The report should be formatted with a clearly readable font type and size, and margins that allow a few notes.

Consider using the Times New Roman font 12pt or the LaTeX standard font when writing. You might have many ideas about great fonts to use, but just remember that there are experts in this that know much more about readability than you

If you prefer to use extra line spacing, say 1.5 then this is fine. The report length requirements refer to standard formatting (normal pages of 2400 chars), so if you choose to increase the line spacing then you may scale the length accordingly.

Your report should include a copyright and license statement for report and material in the electronic archive. This is typically written at the title page.

A a student you are the copyright holder of your work and are free to choose a license for your work unless you meet one or more of the following exceptions:

• You have made an agreement with the university or a company that says something else.
• Your work rely significantly on the work of others.
• You are using other work which does not have a permissive free license.
• You have been paid for (part of) your work.

Disclaimer: I am not a laywer, the above is my understanding of the rules.

I suggest that you use http://creativecommons.org/ to generate a licence of your preference. Unless you have a special reason not to I recommend that you use the most liberal license, beause this increase the interest for your work significantly, as an example I would mention ROS which would never have been a success if it wasn't for the permissive free open source license. I typically use the BSD 3-Clause license for software and the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license for report and hardware etc.

Whenever students are allowed to submit reports of unlimited length the report contains material that is not directly relevant, the content becomes very wordy and the same or similar content are typically repeated several times. The reason is that the students typically skip the editing process which is where you carefully read your report, and rearrange material, leaves out or move to electronic appendices things that are not directly related etc. The editing process should begin a couple of weeks before submission (typically while you still write new material but also can begin to see the overall structure comming together) so you are sure to capture all the small mistakes etc. Some tasks which you should go through during the editing process are:

• Spelling and language check, ask somebody else to help you with this.
• Check that everything is written only once and that you refer to this where it may be relevant.
• Check that all abbreviations are written in full length followed by the abbreviation in brackets the first time they are used like e.g. Global Positioning System (GPS) and that they are all in the list of abbreviations.
• Check that all figures and tables have proper descriptive texts (several lines are ok). Make sure the text somehow answers the question “what would I like the reader to pay special attention to?”. Make sure that the descriptive text is not duplicated i the main text.
• Check that all figures and tables are clearly readable to the extent required for understanding what you want to tell. A hand drawn sketch is just fine and in many cases it makes little sense to spend half a day doing a nice graphical version, but make sure that all material is easy to read without zooming (which is also quite difficult in the paper version…)
• Check that all figure and tables are referred from within the text at least once.
• Check that listed references are all cited within the text at least once.

If you don't go carefully through this editing process then there is a high chance that the quality of your report will be fairly low.

Ask others to help you by reading the report (or parts of it) and give you feedback, this often increases the quality significantly. Maybe you could switch report with other students who are also writing a report and give each other feedback.

Work your way through one final iteration of the Report editing process even though you have probably done this multiple times already. This is tedious work, but surprisingly often reports based countless hours of work contains numerous simple errors that could easily have been identified by a quick read of the report in its entirety.

If you are working in a team submitting a shared report, please make sure that all team members read the report thoroughly and that any issues are dealt with. When handing in you are all responsible for the content of the report and any disagreement concerning report content are to be addressed within the team - not at the exam table.

In addition to your report please hand in code, test results etc. in a zip file (large videos should be separated because of the size). In the root directory please make sure there is a readme document explaining the content of the archive. This you can include in your report as an appendix as well. I personally use a simple readme.html file which links to the various documents making it very easy to navigate.

By now most reports are handed in via an online service. In case you are requested to hand in a paper copy, please consider this:

When handing in your report please use the low-cost binders (tilbudsmapper). It means absolutely nothing to the evaluation of the content. Many students tend to use a spiralled back, however whenever I receive such a report I end up with a lot of loose sheets because I tend to bend it over fully while reading in the train. Others use ring binders, but these are very cumbersome to work with.

Please enclose an electronic version of the report (important!), code, test results etc. in a zip file (large videos should be separated because of the size). In the root directory please make sure there is a readme document explaining the content of the archive. This you can include in your report as an appendix as well. I personally use a simple readme.html file which links to the various documents making it very easy to navigate. In terms of media CD's and DVD's are outdated by now, I haven't had a CD drive for years. Please 1) make the zip archive available on the web and then insert a leaflet in front of the report with a short URL for this or 2) include a low cost USB key if there are many videos etc. which may take a long while to download.

Before beginning writing your thesis report you have to decide a proper workflow. I recommend that you:

1. Write the first part of your report using Google Drive
2. When you are almost finished, transfer the text to LaTeX for formatting etc.

Google Drive gives you the possibility of working together with fellow students on the same documents simultaneously. I have had many students trying it and almost everybody likes it after the initial frustrations that all new tools induce.

Using Google Drive also allows me to easily monitor your progress and give comments on the text. The easier it is for me, the more likely it is that I will engage in your writing process and give comments and suggestions. I will not write any text for you, but I will be happy to discuss the content. There are some annoying limitations to using Google Drive:

• Sections with formulas you should probably write directly in Latex. You may however upload a pdf of that section to Google Drive and link to it from within your document to keep everything organized.
• Don’t waste time manually updating a bibliography in Google Drive. Instead I recommend that you use a reference manager which uses a .bib file as database or at least easily exports to one. Then use our tool at http://fieldrobot.dk/bib to refer from within your document.

I have written several reports and articles in Latex from the beginning. My conclusion after numerous attempt (yours may vary) is that Latex is - with all that comes - a typesetting tool and definitely not a word processor. If you like I work highly dynamical on a text, writing a little here and there, moving things around often, then Latex feels too cumbersome, especially if more than one person is authoring the text.

When it comes to formatting however, nothing beats Latex, so you should definitely move to Latex when you are done with most of the creative writing process.