Group Project Individual Contributions and Key Findings Assignment

Assignment Task

Abstract

This must not be longer than 1 page. Your abstract should provide a brief and concise summary of what your project report contains. The abstract should start with a brief introduction to why you are doing this group project. You should then describe what you did as an individual and how it contributes to the entire project. Finally, you should summarise the main findings of your own individual element of the project, then move on to describe the outcome of the entire project, as well as summarise your conclusions by describing what it is you have learnt as a result of having done this project.

An abstract is not easy to write, especially as it forces you to condense the findings of your project onto one page. Write the abstract after you have completed the rest of your report. Focus on the main themes that have come out of your piece of work. You can look upon the abstract as a chance for you to “sell” your project; it gives you the chance to advertise what you have done and what you have found. 

It is probably the first page anyone will read and so the abstract is very important. It is also an important skill to learn because in industry it is common to be asked to provide executive summaries of projects for senior management who do not have the time to read a whole report.

Introduction and literature review

The first part of your introduction should set the scene/context for the entire group project. Say why you are doing it and then introduce the aims and objectives of the entire group project. These should link to the aims and objectives identified by the team when submitting the project proposal. It is important that you are brief and to the point when discussing the overall aims of the group. In the first part of the introduction, we also expect to see you discuss the commercial importance of the entire project, as this is an important aspect of your Level 5 group project.

Then go on to briefly describe how your individual part of this project fits together in the plans for the entire project. It is acceptable here to show how the work on the group project has been split up across all group members, and then to describe the elements that you have been asked to work on. You may also need to describe those elements in which some joint work has taken place. Following this, go on to list the aims and objectives relevant to your particular contribution, these should relate to the aims and objectives originally identified for individual team members in your project proposal.

Once you have described what it is you are aiming to do, you then need to support this with your literature review. The literature review is to support the element of the work described in this individual report. It is not a literature review for the entire group project. Therefore, please note that this literature review must, by definition, be different from your other team members. It should focus on your element of the project and your element only. 

Therefore, this literature review must be very different from the one submitted with the project proposal (which was for the entire project) and it must be different from your fellow members. Focus on a literature review that supports the technical work that you are presenting in this report. The literature review should be sufficiently detailed to explain why you are doing the investigation that follows, as well as provide sufficient explanation of the background to enable the reader to follow what comes next. However, when compared to individual project report at undergraduate level we wish to see this literature review reduced slightly so you can focus on discussion and analysis later on.

Note that it is common for Level 5 students to do FEA and CFD type analysis for their group project. However, there is often very little justification for doing this. In this section it is important that you justify what you are doing and why you need to use particular computational tools to tackle a problem [if you chose to do so]. You need to demonstrate that you are using FEA and CFD just because you can; it needs to have real engineering reasons to support the work carried out.

An Important Reminder

Do not repeat background material that we teach you in lectures. For example, we do not want to see three pages of the Navier Stokes equation! The knowledge that we deliver in lectures is not, in itself, what we are looking for in a literature review. We do not want you to quote back to us what we have already taught you. Your review should describe your understanding of the knowledge in the literature and show an appreciation of where your project fits in the context of the literature and the rest of your project. We are looking for a critical appraisal of the literature and analysis that supports your arguments regarding the project that follows. Note the crucial difference between repeating existing knowledge in the literature (which is not what we want), and analysing, discussing and critically appraising the literature (which is what we do want). Tell us what you are thinking.

Your literature review must focus on the problem you are investigating. What have others done, how did they do it, how is it relevant to your project, how does it guide your project plan and methodology, and so on. 

Topic-related chapters

There will then follow one or two chapters that will focus on your particular task, or tasks, in the group project. These chapters are likely to include some additional background material that is essential to support your particular contribution, but does not necessarily fit into the literature review section. This may be, for example, a technical description of a particular engineering process or artefact that is necessary to understand what follows. Note that it is very easy to get carried away in this section and write far too much. Background material is great for padding out a poor report (and for encouraging students to think that 70 pages is too short). It is this background section where it is very easy to see if a student has grasped what we are asking for in terms of literature review and background theory. Do not write too much! Do not be too general, be focussed and concise. We only need the essential information to prepare us for what follows in the report. A project report that contains lots of background material is always a signifier of a poor piece of work because it is much easier to draw on material that has already been written than it is to write your own contribution. Remember, do not repeat back to us material we have already taught you.

Then describe your methodology for your individual element(s) of the project. This will describe the methods you are using and why you are using these methods for your particular project. Obviously, the description required here will depend on the particular project but again be concise and to the point. In this section you must explain and justify the methodology you have chosen and also explain why this will allow you to address the aims and objectives of your particular part of the project.

Then describe how this particular methodology has been chosen to fit in with the rest of the group project. For example, how does it link with other work undertaken by the group, when do you need to schedule the completion of this work by, do you need to wait for results from others before you can complete the project, how was this scheduled etc.

To recap: the methodology should describe exactly how it is you have obtained the results that follow. If one of your friends picks up your report, they should be able to repeat exactly what you have done and generate the results that you have obtained. That is, you must write sufficient information in your report to enable anyone to obtain your results by repeating your methodology. This is always a good test of whether you have included enough description with your methodology.

Results and Discussion (Individual elements)

This section should be split into two parts: the first part should be on your individual tasks, the second part should review the entire group project. 

The individual tasks should be discussed here first. This is where you present the findings of your individual elements of the group project and describe them in detail. First, you must describe what it is you are presenting and why. Once you have presented your results you should then go on to discuss what they mean. The discussion section is a crucial part of your project. It is where you demonstrate that you have the understanding that we are looking for.

Results and Discussion (Group)

This section is where you should describe how your part of the project fits into the rest of the group project, and then go on to review the success of the project as a whole. This is where we review you knowledge of the overall project as well as your contribution. Note that although it says group here, this does not mean this section is written by the group. It is written by the individual, but it reflects on the work undertaken by the group.

Start by showing how the results and analysis reported in the previous section impacts on the final group project design. That is, you have worked on individual components of the final artefact, how well did this go in terms of helping the group to deliver the final product. What was your contribution, what role did your design work play, where does it fit into the final design, how important is it, does it function as intended when integrated into the entire project. Introduce any problems that you identified when trying to integrate the output of your individual tasks into the final group design. Were there any technical difficulties that you needed to overcome when linking the individual components of the project together – did you foresee these problems, or did you need to amend your solutions in order to enable better integration into the final product. Were your forced to change your design because of external factors, such as the actions of others or technical problems identified by other group members. Tell us what happened; tell us about any problems and how you overcame these. What did you do to help the group achieve its goals.

Once you have discussed the relationship between your individual tasks and the group project as a whole, you should go on to review the output from the entire project. Here, you may wish to present results from the entire project – say from final tests for a completed product and/or results from tests that require a number of individual contributions before you are able to gain results. This may generate a set of results for a group – this is not a problem, you may presents graphs or figures that are common across group members as long as they refer to outputs from the entire project. However, we expect the supporting text, including the analysis and discussion to be written by yourself. Everyone will have their own particular insight into the what the final results mean and ultimately the success of the project. This will include a unique insight into how an individual’s contribution affected the final project. Therefore, the text in this section must be different from other members of the team. That is, the only commonalities permitted between reports is in the tables and figures presented for the final group design, all discussions of these results must be different otherwise we will consider this to be plagiarism.

Finally, please ensure that this discussion of the outcomes of the group project also includes a review of the commercial importance of the final design, as well as its relation to social and environmental issues.

General guidance on results and discussion. This applies to both sections.

Think very carefully about how you present your results. Obviously it is often appropriate to use graphs or tables. If you chose to use graphs make sure that you label each axis and that everything in the chart/figure can easily be read. Make sure all axis labels contain units. Fonts must be no smaller than 11 in your figures! It is very common to see projects without labels for graphs and text that is far too small to read. Also, think very carefully about how much information to include on each graph/table – the results you are trying to present must be easy to follow. Label and number each graph/table. You must also decide what data to include in your graphs. You do not have to plot every set of data that you generated. What you are trying to do is use your results to support your discussion and findings. Include only those results that are important.

For example, you may have been doing some numerical calculations or experimental work; your first set of results may have been poor, but should they be included? It depends on what happened. If you just made a few silly mistakes then do not include them. But if this first set of results told you something important and informed what you did in the future then there may be a case for including them. You must make a decision about what results are important to the outcomes of your project. We will assess your decisions.

If your project contains data presented in graphical form you should also look to include error flags, where appropriate. You should also include in your results section a discussion of possible errors that may have occurred when generating this data and their impact on the results that you are presenting. It is also a good idea to discuss any assumptions that have been made when generating or obtaining this data. This applies equally to theoretical and experimental work.

Then place the results you have obtained in context. How good are they? How reliable are they? Are they sufficiently good to enable you to meet the objectives of your project? We understand that it is not always possible to obtain good results during a project. What we are interested in is first your understanding that your results may have some problems, and second your appreciation of why your results are not as good as you would like them to be. This is part of demonstrating that you understand what you are doing and that you have learnt something when undertaking the project. We are far more likely to mark you down if you try and pass off what are obviously poor results as being very good. Instead, you should show us that you understand why your results are not very good and, perhaps, suggest how the problems you experienced may be overcome in the future.

In the discussion we are looking for is for you to interpret and explain what your results mean. What do they tell us about the subject of your report? What have you found out, what have you learnt? Crucially, we are looking for critical analysis and interpretation of the results. This is a very important aspect of your project, you should be able to look at your results and tell us what they mean and to place your results in context with the literature that you quoted at the start of this report. A critical analysis of your findings means that you should compare what you have found with what other people have found (this is why your literature review is very important). You should review the differences between your results and those in the literature; describe why they are different; tell us what you have found out that has not previously been reported in the literature; describe what your contribution is. The critical review of a project’s outcomes, and its placing in context with results that are already available in the literature, is a crucial skill and one we will be looking for when marking these projects. 

What we do not want to see is you repeating in words what is shown graphically in your charts or diagrams. This is a common mistake: this is not analysis or discussion, it is simply an example of an inability to interpret your findings. Your figures are there for a reason: they allow you to present in a concise and simple way some of the results that you have obtained. This means you do not have to describe what is in these figures: we can see for ourselves! Focus on telling us what these figures mean, what are they telling you, what do they reveal about the problem you are studying. If you are unable to say what it is the figures are telling you, then you should think carefully about why you have included them.

Conclusions

Your conclusions should be short and to the point. They should summarise what it is you have learnt in the results and discussion sections in a simple way that is easy to read. These conclusions should review your own contributions, as well as the output of the team. The conclusions are very important in that they allow us to see if you have understood what it is you are doing and the overall implications of the project. In the conclusions you demonstrate that you are able to take an overview of your contribution, as well as the entire project and to work out what are the most important and significant themes/findings of your group project. In your results/discussion sections you may find many different and detailed things, but these should support an overall (higher level) summary/observation for your project. It is also good practice to compare these final findings with what is concluded in the literature.

An example of a poor conclusions section is one that goes back to the discussion and repeats (almost word for word) exactly what was written in the discussion section. This then leads to a very long conclusions section. This is not what we want. We want you to join together all of your detailed finding in the previous chapter to identify a common theme or overall findings/conclusions for your project. What we are looking for is your ability to tease out a general overview of what it is your results are telling you.

If you follow these guidelines you should be looking to write a set of conclusions that is no longer than one page long and certainly never longer than two pages long. If you find that your conclusions are too long it is because you have not taken an overview of your results. We will not specify a maximum length for the conclusions but you will be marked down if they are too long.

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