Project Report Guidelines

Our projects involve investigation of the behavior of a physical system through simulation. The heart of the assignment is your investigation of the system, and there are several basic elements to a report that describes your work.

Please be aware that, since everyone will solve the problem in these assignments, you will be evaluated on your understanding of the system and the numerical techniques involved, as evidenced by your written report.

General Items to Include in a Report

1. Introductory Remarks - describe the physics of the system and introduce any special numerical approach that is required.
2. Describe the Numerical Method - describe the algorithm that is used to solve the problem. Give example listings of your program to show how it is implemented. Sometimes, as described below, development steps are identified in the assignment. In this case, you should be sure to show the program as it appeared at these milestone points.
3. Program Verification - tell what you did to verify that the program gives correct results.
4. Presentation of Results - present the results of running the program to demonstrate the behavior of the system under different circumstances. Results might be presented in graphical form or as tables, as appropriate. Be sure that results that are presented are labeled properly, so that the reader can figure out what has been calculated and what is being displayed.
5. Analysis - sometimes, we will take the results of many runs and derive relationships between the variables of the model and computed quantities. When this occurs, you should present this analysis and comment on the accuracy of the relationship.
6. Discussion - present a discussion of the physical behavior of the system based on your simulations and answer any special questions posed in the assignment.

Dealing with Assignment "Steps"

In posing an assignment, I will often give you a series of developmental steps and questions to lead to a final working program or suggest topics for investigation when the final model is complete. Usually, these steps fall naturally among the points in the general outline provided above.

When explicit project steps are identified, the project report should explicitly address these points.

When the steps refer to project milestones, it is appropriate to provide program listings, sample output and discussion as requested in the assignment.

If the step is a set of questions, then the point is to be sure that these questions are answered in your writeup.

Submission of Project Reports

Report Format

Most students find it convenient to use some sort of word processor to write their reports. To make this simple, we try to supply a word processor on the lab computing system that will allow you to write your report there. However, you may, of course, also write your report using your own word processing software.

Electronic Submission of Reports

Copy your report to the location on the system disks that is given in the assignment.

Please note that I am limited in the number of report formats that I can accept. I prefer to receive pdf files, which can be created with Open Office as one of the export options. However, I can also take files in Microsoft Word, Star Office, or Open Office. If you have another word processor in mind, then you will have to write an output file in either pdf or postscript format.

One feature of electronic copies generated from the internal formats of word processing programs, such as Word, is that my software does not always faithfully reproduce the appearance of texts, since usually there is a translation involved from e.g. MS Word to whatever program I am using on my workstation. Usually this is not a problem, but sometimes pages are reformatted in unpredictable ways.

Hardcopy Submission of Reports

You may always submit a hardcopy to me. Sometimes this is the easiest thing for all concerned, so do not feel compelled to make the report electronic.

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