Every other Friday at midnight (or as noted on the syllabus), design subteams must hand in a single design progress report (only one per team) emailed to the Design Advisor. This is a formal report, so spelling, grammar, and sentence structure are taken into account in grading. All figures and tables should be numbered, and well-labeled. Figures and tables should not stand alone. Rather, they must have references and explanations in the text. Below is a suggestion on how to organize the report. The questions are generic questions that subteams should be thinking about during the design process, but not every question will be relevant to each team. Use your judgment to determine which aspects are relevant to your task and need to be addressed in the report.
Late reports will receive a penalty of 10% of the grade for each day late that they are submitted.
The purpose of the first section is to describe the problem and solution process. When writing this section, your target audience should be someone with technical engineering knowledge who is not necessarily familiar with AguaClara technology. This will be the only part due for the first design report unless you have already made significant progress. Since most of the information in the Introduction and Design Details below (perhaps with the exception of the “solution approach” subsection, which may change as you delve deeper into your task) will not change from week to week, teams may resubmit these sections from the previous week unchanged. If any changes are made, they must be given in italicized font to distinguish from previously written material.
Give a concise description of your task.
Explain the relationship of your task to the existing code.
Explain the relevant constraints on your design.
Explain any assumptions you have to make.
Explain your solution approach.
This section is informal. The following sections may be in submitted bulleted list form. Each week, you must submit the documentation pieces of all of the preceding weeks in addition to that week. That means each documentation section must be headed with the appropriate date. List documentation sections in order from earliest to latest and be sure to include all previous documentation sections in every updated version of your report.
List specific questions you have.
Document any unresolved errors or bugs you have run into.
Teams will receive their reports back with comments on both parts. In the Problem Definition part, responses to comments (where appropriate) and corrections must be integrated seamlessly into the report, and they must be bolded to distinguish from previously written material. Do not delete the comments to which you are responding when submitting new reports. In the documentation part, the comments will include suggestions for overcoming problems. Do not delete these comments either so that we can keep track of what works and what doesn’t work.