GSOE9011 - Engineering Research Challenge Assessment

Overview and motivation (GSOE9011)

Early in the Term, you will be assigned to a team of 4-5 students, and that team will research a topic under one of the Engineering Research Challenges, developing a research question, and then a proposal for conducting that research, appropriate to one of the scenarios presented below.

Note that there is a process for selection of teams by the Course Coordinator, based on a survey in SurveyMonkey, accessed through Moodle. You should complete this survey as soon as you can.

Note also that teams of a different initial size will be considered only under exceptional circumstances, and non-one will be allowed to work on their own. If team members withdraw early enough in the term, teams may be merged. Loss of team members after early tasks have been completed may mean smaller teams continue their work, rather than disrupting other teams. This cannot be helped, nor changed, and reflects real-world circumstances, under which tasks sometimes need to be completed by a team smaller than original intended or envisaged. We have had teams shrink to two members, and the task has still been completed, and on time.

Back to the task itself…

The Research Proposal is the major assessment task in this course, bringing together in a specific context and in a single document many of the ideas covered in the learning materials and activities, along with the collective experience, interest, knowledge, perspectives, skills and attitudes of the team members.

Students continuing on to undertake a Research Project in their Masters program can use it as a way of developing a proposal to show to potential supervisors. Students who have been exempted from the Research Project can use it as practice for developing research proposals in an industry setting. Whichever focus you take, the document must satisfy the requirements described below.

Learning outcomes

Upon successful completion of this task, you will have:

• critically reviewed, in some depth and detail, the literature on an aspect of one Engineering Research Challenge (ERC) in detail, and;

• proposed a research plan to answer a research question under one ERC topic.

Title page

Information on the title page should include the name of the institution, faculty and course, assessment name, collaborative research group, assessment title, your names and Student ID numbers, plus the date submitted (ensure this is current, consistent with the date you submit online).

Abstract

The abstract is essentially an executive summary, which gives a brief overview of the entire document. It is different from an ‘introduction’. An abstract should not include any material that does not appear also in the body, no figures or tables, and no referencing (include the references in the body). You should explain briefly, in non-technical terms what the project is, why it is important, how it will be approached and what could be the possible outcomes. It should be only one or two paragraphs in length .

Introduction

The Introduction briefly explains the background or context of the project. It sets out how the project fits in broad context, what it involves, why it is important, and what will be the benefits of a successful outcome. It should be only one or two paragraphs in length.

Literature Review

The Literature Review needs to set the narrower context for the project and describes in detail the background to the problem you plan to solve. You should describe the various aspects, limitations, constraints, and so forth, of the problem, and should describe and analyse any prior work either in this particular problem (or a closely related problem, if your problem hasn’t yet been addressed). The strengths and weaknesses of prior work need to be identified and you need to “carve out” the precise problem as an approach to address existing weaknesses (identify a ‘gap’ in knowledge or technology). In this section, you should also provide an analysis of the experimental techniques that are relevant to this problem, especially those techniques that have been used in prior work. Conclude your literature review with a gap analysis.