Civil engineering assignment literature review

300483 Engineering Project

Student Guidelines

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 3

2. Planning 3

3. Process 3

4. Assessment 3

4.1 Progress Report 4

4.2 Oral Presentation 5

4.3 Final Report 5

5. Guidelines to Report Writing 7

5.1 Fonts and Font Size 7

5.2 Heading and Formatting 7

5.3 Figures and Tables 8

5.4 Making Paragraphs 8

5.5 Units 9

5.6 References 9

Appendix A - Engineering Project Register 11

Appendix B - Engineering Project Team Agreement 13

Appendix C - Meeting and Event Register 16

Appendix D - Sample Title Page 19

Appendix E – Supervisor’s Approval Form 20

Appendix F – Engineering Project Log Book Template 22

Appendix G – Engineering Project Peer Review Report 26

This unit includes a capstone project which demonstrates student's professional level of identifying, planning, designing, executing, testing and documenting an engineering project or activity. It is expected that the students select the project in such a way that all the above aspects are covered. However, in some instances it may not be possible to practically carry-out each and every of above activities. In such cases, students must demonstrate the skills and knowledge involved in those activities through writing in the project report.

It is the student’s responsibility to identify a suitable project. It is recommended that the student can start looking for a project when they have completed 3 years of course work (240CPs). It is useful for students to complete their Industrial Experience before undertaking Engineering Project. Thus, it is desired that students may wish to complete their Industrial Experience unit in 3rd year before undertaking Engineering Project in 4th year.

Some of the organisations that can be contacted for a project are:

• City Councils

• Consulting Companies

• Building and Construction Companies

• Manufacturing industries and companies

• University’s Capital Works and Facilities Department

• State and Federal Departments

• Voluntary/ non-profit Organisations

• School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics

Once the student identifies a project, he/she must form a team of three students at most who are studying in the similar or same level and email a potential supervisor to express interest and seek approval to undertake a project. After the supervisor has approved your expression of interest submit Engineering Project Registration Form and Supervision Agreement Form as well as the Team Agreement Form (see Appendices A, B and C) to the unit coordinator on or before the end of Week 2. Once the approval is granted, the students will work under the guidance of the academic supervisor(s). It is the students’ responsibilities to organise regular meetings with the academic supervisor(s) so that the project progresses consistently in both two half sessions through the whole year.

The assessment mainly includes:

• Progress report;

• Oral Presentation; and

• Final Report

The Progress Report includes two parts: a) Group Progress Report; and b) Individual Management Report. Both of them must be completed in Microsoft Word.

The following standards are recommendations for the group progress report, however all aspects of these guidelines are subject to the supervisor's discretion and should be discussed between the student and the supervisor. A team has to submit a group progress report on or before the specified date (check Unit’s Learning Guide for details). The length of the group progress report should be within 50 pages (excluding appendices). The group progress report should contain the following sections:

• Cover: 1 page

• Executive Summary/Abstract: 1 page

• Acknowledgement: 1 page

• Introduction: 1 to 3 pages length containing brief background, need for the research, research objectives and outline of the report.

• Literature review: 10 to 15 pages length, which should critically examine the previous research or design project under the proposed project and justify the need for the proposed project.

• Aim and Objectives: 1-2 pages length

• Methodologies and Theoretical background: provide up to 10 to 15 pages of the theory which will be needed to carry forward the engineering project to successful completion.

• Preliminary Data Collection/ Analysis: up to 10 pages, students are expected to provide some data and their analysis in their progress report. This will give an indication on the results which may be provided in the final report.

• Conclusions or Summary, about 1 page length, which contains the overall conclusion from the report and the likely outcomes expected in the final report.

• List of references.

• Appendices (include a Gantt chart, which shows the detail timeline of the project completion for both two half sessions and meeting minutes between team members and supervisor(s) and the team during the 1st half session, etc. as well as the other forms).

If more than one student is involved in the project, the Group Progress Report must include the details of the composition of the group with clear indication on the contribution of each member of the group. Past and future contributions from each member of the group must be clearly defined. This information will be used along with the individual peer-review reports to assign individual mark for each student in a group.

Each member in a team needs to submit the Individual Management Report. The contents of the Individual Management Report include the week-by-week based engineering logbook and peer-review report for the first half session. The engineering logbook is a weekly dairy which is used to record your activities every week. The confidential peer-review report must be finished for marking your teammates’ performances on the project during the semester. This report also needs an Assignment Cover Sheet.

While the assessment criteria are given in Unit’s Learning Guide, some of the Oral Presentation Guidelines are listed below:

• Presentation should not exceed 20 minutes duration, with 5 minutes allocated for question time.

• MS PowerPoint or similar software MUST be used.

• Avoid overly complex explanations in the presentation. Try to communicate the most important notions first and then round off with other information.

• Use dot points, occasionally indented one level. This reduces what the audience will concentrate on and encourages them to listen to the detail you are speaking.

• Do not use slides with detailed schematics. The detail shown will invariably be too small to read and the detailed explanation will detract from the central ideas being conveyed. If schematics are necessary, they should be simplified to illustrate the essential features and with enlarged printing and diagrams. Overheads of a detailed nature should be prepared in anticipation of questions asked by those in the audience who need to examine such detail.

• Speak clearly, look around at the audience and project your voice. Do not turn your back to the audience to talk to the projection behind you – use the mouse pointer in a PowerPoint presentation.

• The presentation should try to show that the project being proposed is feasible, that the amount of effort needed is not excessive, that the details have been thought through as far as presently possible and the project is "do-able".

• Avoid a presentation that talks entirely about generalities. Present specific task oriented information. Treat the presentation as the start of your final project.

• On the day of the presentation, each student is expected to be present throughout the entire program.

• Just as in the written report, the presentation should include references. It is most unprofessional to use the ideas of others and not to acknowledge them. Please ensure you acknowledge sources of information and cite references.

• Begin your presentation with the project title, student name and id number, and supervisor’s name.

• Examiners look for: professional appearance, clarity of diction, volume, use of PowerPoint (such as not turning your back to class), the look of the PowerPoint slides (use of dot points, clarity of images – photos, tables or graphs) and technical content. Questions will usually be directed at the technical content and the data analyses sections of the presentation.

The Final Report also includes two parts: a) Group Final Report; and b) Individual Management Report. Both of them must be completed in Microsoft Word.

The following standards are recommendations for the group final report, however all aspects of these guidelines are subject to the supervisor's discretion and should be discussed between the student and the supervisor. The report may vary in length between about 100 to 150 pages excluding appendices. Approximate page counts for each part of the project will be dependent on the nature of the work carried out, but the following can be used as an approximate guide:

• Cover: 1 page

• Executive Summary/Abstract: 1 page

• Acknowledgement: 1 page

• Introduction: 1 to 3 pages length containing brief background, need for the research, research objectives and outline of the report.

• Literature review: 10-20 pages which should provide critically examine the previous research or design project under the proposed project and justify the need for the proposed project.

• Aim and Objectives: 1-2 pages length

• Methodologies: 5-15 pages length

• Theoretical Background: provide up to 10 to 15 pages of the theory which will be needed to carry forward the engineering project to successful completion.

• Data Collection: up to 10 to 20 pages of data collection. Present the data in a concise manner mostly in the form of tables and graphs. Often a page of write up can be replaced by a table or a graph.

• Data Analysis and/or design details: up to 30 pages, students should provide a comprehensive analysis of all the data and where necessary provide detailed design details.

• Conclusions and Further Work, about 3 to 5 pages length, which contains the overall conclusion from the report and the likely outcomes expected in the final report.

• List of references.

• Appendices (include an updated Gantt chart, which shows the detail timeline of the project completion for both two half sessions and meeting minutes between team members and supervisor(s) and the team during the 1st half session, etc. as well as the other forms).

If more than one student is involved in the project, the Group Final Report must include the details of the composition of the group with clear indication on the contribution of each member of the group. This information will be used along with the individual peer-review reports to assign individual mark for each student in a group.

Each member in a team also needs to submit the Individual Management Report. The contents of the Individual Management Report still include engineering log book and peer-review report for the second half session. The engineering log book is a weekly dairy which is used to record your activities weekly. The confidential peer-review report must be finished for marking your teammates’ performances on the project during the semester. This report also needs an Assignment Cover Sheet.

For quality control purpose on the final report, it requires a formal approval signed by academic supervisor(s) to grant her/his permission for submission and the form can be found in Appendix F.

Important: The formatting is the one that gives an immediate impression about your report to the examiner. If you are after higher grade, you should take the formatting very seriously and follow the standard format, which is normally used for technical writing.

Use Arial, 12 font size, 1.5 or double space and 2.0 cm page margin all around. Always print single sided.

Chapter heading:

Chapter 1

(First letter capital, bold, centred)

INTRODUCTION

(All capitals, bold, centred)

First Side Heading:

1.1 GENERAL (All capitals, bold, left aligned)

Second Side Heading:

1.1.1 Problem Identification (First letter of every word capital, bold, left aligned)

Third Side heading:

1.1.1.1 Problem statement (First letter of first word capital, bold, left aligned)

Fourth Side Heading:

Risk assessment: The risk... (First letter of first word capital, underline, no numbering, full stop and continue with the sentence)

• You should arrange your headings within the above four levels.

• In the case of I, II and III side headings leave one line blank on the top and one at the bottom.

Figure headings should be always at the bottom, while the table headings should be at the top. All the figures and tables should be referenced within the text. For example, Table 1.1 shows the data collected…. The Fig. 1.1 shows the experimental setup used in this study…. All the figures and tables should be numbered in the same order as they are referenced. Each tables and figures will have two numbers; first number will represent chapter number. For example, in Table 1.2, the first digit represents that the table in Chapter 1. Horizontally centre the tables and figures.

Samples:

Table 1.2 Sample data for demonstration

Fig. 1.2 Microscope used for the experiments

The paragraphs should as independent as possible. Don’t assume that the reader have read previous chapters/paragraphs. You should always reference back if you think that the reader should know before understanding a particular sentence or sentences.

Always use SI units. Always use the standard symbols for all the units. Some of the common units and the corresponding standard units are given in Table 2.

Table 2. List of common units and corresponding symbols

Always use Harvard Referencing Style. While quoting citations in the text always use the authors last name and the date of publications. For example: Whitefield (1992); Whitefield and Randall (1992). If the number of authors is more than two then use et al. For example: Whitefield et al. (1992). Also, there are two ways of quoting the citations in the text:

1. The experimental data presented by Whitefield (1992) depicts drastic deterioration of water quality with respect to time…..

2. The experimental data presented in the literature (Whitefield, 1992) depicts drastic deterioration of water quality with respect to time…..

You should reference all the material which you have obtained from the literature. Please contact library for a copy of Harvard Style referencing guideline.

Appendix

Various Forms