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This document should make sense to a senior engineer at Cornell who is unconnected to AguaClara.
Expectations
A reflection research report is a written document that reflects the high level of effort and professionalism expected in the engineering profession. Spelling and grammatical errors should be eliminated. Your team is expected to follow the formatting guidelines dictated on this page and utilize your best judgment when writing these reflectionsreports. Your reports should always have a designated Report Proofreader; this individual is responsible for ensuring that there are no spelling, grammatical, and formatting errors. Different individuals on your team can hold this role over the course of the semester, but be sure to note who holds that role in each report that you submit.
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The report should include the following sections with some flexibility based on the scope of your project:
- Your detailed Detailed task list. - You should keep and update your detailed task list from the first assignment in each of your reports. Denote completed tasks and modify your deadlines to reflect your most recently completed progress and any delays.
- Literature review - Discuss what is already known about your research area. Connect your objectives with what is already known and explain what additional contribution you intend to make.
- Introduction - Explain how your completion of your challenge will affect AguaClara and our mission of providing safe drinking water (or sustainable wastewater treatment!). If this is a continuing team, how will your contribution build upon previous research? What needs to be further discovered or defined? If this is a new team, what prompted the inclusion of this team?
- Methods Methods - Explain the techniques you have used to acquire additional data and insights. The techniques should be described in sufficient detail so that another researcher could duplicate your work.
- Analysis - Connect your work to fundamental physics/chemistry/statics/fluid mechanics or whatever field is appropriate. Analyze your results and compare with theoretical expectations or if you have not yet done the experiments, describe your expectations based on established knowledge. Include implications of your results. How will your results influence the design of AguaClara plants? If possible provide clear recommendations for design changes that should be adopted.
- Conclusions - Explain what you have learned and how that influences your next steps. Make sure that you defend your conclusions. (this is conclusions, not opinions!)
- Future work - Describe your plan of action for the next several weeks of research.
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