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

WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics

Engineering Project Register

(To be submitted to the Unit Coordinator)

Student Numbers and Name(s): ……………………

___________________________________

_____________________________________

Semester/Year :

Major: (Tick Appropriate Box)

COMPUTER ELECTRICAL ROBOTIC & MECHATRONICS

ENVIRONMENTAL CIVIL TELECOMMUNICATIONS MECHANICAL CONSTRUCTION

Project Topic:

Topic:

Client: ......................................................................................................... (if applicable)

Any other comments: …………………………………………………………………

…………………………………………………………………………………………

Academic Supervisor(s): ………………………….…………

PLEASE SUBMIT APPENDICES A,B AND C FORMS THROUGH ASSESSMENT FOLDER on vUWS

WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics

Engineering Project Team Agreement

(To be submitted to the Unit Coordinator)

Student Numbers and Name(s): ……………………

___________________________________

_____________________________________

Semester/Year :

Major: (Tick Appropriate Box)

COMPUTER ELECTRICAL ROBOTIC & MECHATRONICS

ENVIRONMENTAL CIVIL TELECOMMUNICATIONS MECHANICAL CONSTRUCTION

Project Topic:

Topic:

Team Agreements:

The team member should have a meeting to set up the rules on team activities by answering the following questions:

• When will we attempt to ‘meet’ for discussion (what time, how often, how will we use chat, bulletin board, email, phone, face to face meetings)?

• On average, how long should our meetings be?

• When is it OK to miss a meeting or contribute to scheduled online discussions?

• How do we inform each other when we can’t be there for a meeting or are running late?

• How will we deal with lateness to meetings and for late contributions to online discussion?

• What does “on time” mean for each meeting?

• What do we do with mobile phone calls & text messaging during meetings?

• How do we deal with members who don’t participate enough, participate too much or distract the team from its task?

• How are we going to make decisions?

• What will we do if a team member’s work doesn’t meet our standards?

• Any other agreements you think will be important for effective operation.

___________________________________________________________________

We all understand and agree to the above team agreements.

Team Members:

Student Names: ______________________________________________________

Student Signatures: ____________________________________________________

Date ____/____/____

Witnessed by Principal Supervisor:

Name: __________________________ Signature: _________________________

Date ____/____/____

PLEASE SUBMIT APPENDICES A,B AND C FORMS THROUGH ASSESSMENT FOLDER on vUWS

WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics

300483 Engineering Project

Meeting and Event Register (1st half session)

(To be signed by the student and his/her supervisor at each meeting or completion of an event – omission of this task may result in a Fail Grade)

Progress Meetings:

Regular progress meetings shall be held at least every 2 weeks, lasting about 30 minutes. This form allows for weekly meetings. Student & Supervisor are to agree on dates and insert into the student’s handbook below:-

WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics

300483 Engineering Project

Meeting and Event Register (2nd half session)

Progress Meetings

Regular progress meetings shall be held at least every 2 weeks, lasting about 30 minutes. This form allows for weekly meetings. Student & Supervisor are to agree on dates and insert into the student’s handbook below:

Automation for the Manufacturing of Hose Assemblies

Tim Gradden

A Capstone Project submitted for partial fulfilment for the degree of

Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical)

Supervisors

A/Prof Richard Yang (Academic) and Mr David Gradden (Industrial)

School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics

Western Sydney University

October 2016

WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics

300483 Engineering Project

Supervisor’s Approval Form on Final Report Submission

This document is an outline of how the work in the Engineering Project is to be finalised in the 2nd half session. Further details are contained in the 'Unit Outline' and ‘Learning Guide” documents. Students enrolled in 300483 Engineering Project must agree to these conditions.

1. It is a supervised project to be completed at an approved standard and is to be recognised as such.

2. The work plan is completed 100% in the project at a time decided by the supervisor with meeting all major milestones planned.

3. The final report is well written according to the guidelines listed being of letter quality A4, with properly presented diagrams, graphical material and pertinent theory if applicable.

Student Name_________________________ Student Number ______________________

Date:____/____/____ Student Signature ___________________________________

Project Topic:

………………………………………………………….

…..

I have read through the final report drafted by the students in the team and would like to approve the final submission since the report are reaching the quality required according the guidelines.

Principal Academic Supervisor:

Name_____________________________ Signature _________________________

Date ____/____/____

PLEASE RETURN THIS FORM TO:

Reception, School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics

Building XB, Kingswood Campus

Western Sydney University

WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics

300483 Engineering Project

This log book should be typed (in this word file) individually by each student on their weekly performance. At the end of the semester each half session, two hardcopies of this log book as the first part of the individual management report must be submitted accompanying with the group progress/final report to the unit coordinator for marking purpose.

Student Name: _______________________________________________________________

Student ID: __________________________________________________________________

Team Number: _______________________________________________________________

Names of Team Members: _____________________________________________________

Title of Project: _______________________________________________________________

Supervisor(s): ________________________________________________________________

Semester: ______________________; Year: _____________________

Record Period: .……..../ …..…../…….... to .……..../ …..…../……....

Peer Evaluation – Group Project – Evaluation Criteria and Standards
DO NOT submit this page

This template is a modified version based on that developed by Dr Sara Denize, School of Marketing, UWS

Each group member will receive an adjusted project grade based on the average of the evaluations by their peer group members, including your own self-evaluation. It is essential that each group member be very honest in their evaluation of peers’ performance and subsequent score.

NOTE: The unit coordinator reserves the right to review peer evaluations. Overly harsh evaluations and very generous may be revised by the unit coordinator.

300483 Engineering Project – Peer Review Report

(Submit this page as the second part of the Individual Management Report to unit coordinator)

This template based on that developed by Dr Sara Denize, School of Marketing, UWS

WEIGHTING: Each group member will receive the average of the marks awarded by the group.

RESPONSIBILITY: Assigning grades to peers is a serious responsibility as it can have a powerful impact on an individual. Scores should be assigned objectively, honestly and according to each individual's contribution to the group.

NOTE: The unit coordinator reserves the right to review peer evaluations.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Fill out the evaluation form listed below for all of your group members. Make sure to include yourself.

2. For each of the 9 categories, enter the appropriate score (0 to 10 using the criteria and standards provided on the previous page). A score of 8 indicates that you believe the individual contributed FULLY and as EXPECTED to the group project. Repeat this for each group member. In making your evaluations:

• Disregard your general impressions and concentrate on one criterion at a time.

• Study carefully the definition given for each criterion and the standards for each level of the criteria.

• Call to mind instances that are typical of the individual’s work and behaviour. Do not be influenced by unusual cases that are not typical.

1. Comments must be used to support your ratings.

2. List all of the tasks you completed for the project. In other words, what specifically did you contribute to the group effort?

List below the specific tasks you completed for the project:

Comments about the performance of group or individual member: