TMA 01 - Project Proposal and Initial Progress Assignment

Assignment Task

1. Introduction

You must contact your tutor as soon as possible after the start of the module. You must also start work on your project as soon as possible – well in advance of the submission date for this TMA.

The first task is identifying a project topic. Section 4 of the Project Choice document, ‘Identifying a topic’, gives guidance on this, as does the Project preparation forum, which you should already have been using. You will also find it helpful to look through the Sample Project Titles and Project Ideas. You will be considering in detail any legal, social, ethical and professional issues relating to your choice in TMA 02, but at this point you should consider whether these are likely to be serious enough to mean your project choice is inappropriate. For example, proposing to develop an app to print guns using a 3D printer would be inappropriate! Legal Social Ethical Professional issues will help you evaluate your choices.

If you have any doubts over this ask your tutor’s advice. As soon as you think you have an initial, feasible idea you should consult your tutor before doing anything else. If you cannot think of an idea, still contact your tutor as he or she will help you think through the issues and identify some possible ways forward. When you and your tutor are happy that you have a well-developed idea that it is clearly feasible, then you can begin work towards completing this TMA.

Below, TM470 projects are divided into three main categories: research, development and evaluation projects. You should identify which category your project is in. It is possible your project may span more than one category but we suggest you mainly concentrate on just one as this will result in a more comprehensive and in-depth output. Your choice of category/categories will affect the project work you need to do. In particular it will affect the output and the tasks and subtasks you need to complete in order to produce this:

• A research project will usually include addressing a research question or considering a research problem and exploring possible approaches to solving this described in other people’s published work. The output will probably be a research report which includes comprehensively justified recommendations for a solution and an evaluation and justification of its likely effectiveness and the project work will include an extensive review and analysis of academic and/or technical literature.
• For a development project , depending upon what you are creating, the output may include software, hardware or designs and the project work designing, implementing in some way and testing.
• For an evaluation project the output will probably include an evaluation report including recommendations, and the project work include a range of analysis, evaluation, and perhaps design, activities.

So when we refer to ‘project work’ in TM470, the details of this will vary in their nature according to the category of project.

When choosing your topic and the category your project will fall under, you need to take into account both the degree you are registered for and BCS constraints.

• If you are registered in a Computing and IT (Honours degree) specialist route your project needs to be based on the specialism you chose, i.e., on one or more of your core level 3 modules.
• Our Computing and IT awards are accredited by the BCS; this, however, imposes constraints on the project you can do (see 4.3 External constraints). Please check with your tutor whether your project will fulfil BCS guidelines for undergraduate projects. If you chose to do a project that does not fulfil these guidelines you will not be able to pursue BCS accreditation with your degree.

You may have noticed in the Study Guide that LO11 includes the phrase ‘You should be able to develop and demonstrate the ability to analyse a practical problem and devise and implement a solution which should be within the area of your chosen specialist route, if applicable, building on, and extending, the knowledge and skills developed throughout your earlier OU studies and experience’. TM470 interprets the word ‘implement’ in quite a broad way, so it encompasses research reports, software, a complete specification or design and so on. So, the word ‘implement’ does not restrict project choice to only development projects.

Your work will have three main elements:

• preparing for and planning your project;
• the project work;
• reviewing and reflecting upon your planning and preparation, and project work.

The remainder of this document is divided into four sections: a summary of the project activities you will be reporting on in TMA 01; a summary of what you need to submit for TMA 01; guidance on completing TMA 01; and the indicative mark scheme.

Four notes of caution

The marking of this TMA will assume that you have been working at the required study rate since you started the module. You should be spending about 75% of your time on your project work, and about 25% of your time writing TMA 01.

TM470 is designed to help you learn how to carry out an academic project as well as providing you with the opportunity to actually do an academic project. As this is probably the first time you have done an academic project it is possible your early TMAs’ marks may be lower than for previous modules. This is quite common and is not necessarily indicative of the overall module result. A difficult start can still lead to an excellent result (and the reverse, an excellent start may not be sustained and lead to a low grade unless the high standard of work continues throughout the project).

As soon as you have submitted TMA 01 you should read TMA 02, so you have this in mind as you continue with your project. Continue to work on your project while you are waiting for the feedback on this TMA from your tutor, or it will be difficult to keep to your project plan. Stay in touch with your tutor on a regular basis between TMA 01 and TMA 02, letting him or her know what progress you have made and asking questions as necessary.

Throughout your project you should make regular backups, perhaps to a cloud service or an external hard drive. This is your responsibility and the University cannot make allowances for loss of data resulting from hardware failure.

2. Project activities

When you submit TMA 01 you will be expected to have made progress on the following project activities, which are derived from the module learning outcomes.

• Identifying the goals and content of your project.
• Starting to select and evaluate relevant information sources that describe related work and point to possible methods to be used.
• Identifying resources (especially data, access to people, etc.) that are crucial for success and assured yourself that these will be available when needed.
• Identifying and evaluating your own skills and knowledge that are crucial for the success of this project. Identifying essential skills that you lack and starting to develop them.
• Choosing an appropriate project lifecycle model and starting to plan and schedule the work required based upon this.
• Undertaking some exploratory work to begin the project work.
• Reflect on progress to date.

You should maintain a project journal as you complete these activities, containing a record of what you have done and why, what you have read, problems you have encountered and how you overcame them, and so on. This will make writing your TMAs and EMA much easier to do.

Before starting these activities you should study the guidance in Section 3 and the indicative marking scheme in Section 4 – the latter outlines some of the expectations of your tutor so bear these in mind as you do the work.

As you complete these activities, refer to the various documents on the TM470 website, linked from Resource Map: Resources for TMA 01 as these are designed to assist you.

This TMA 01 - Engineering has been solved by our PhD Experts at My Uni Paper.