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Department of Computer Science and Technology

 

About halfway through the project you are required to report on the progress that you have made. There is a formal requirement for a written report of 300 to 500 words, which will go to your project checkers for review. You will then prepare a short (~5 minute) presentation which will summarise the progress report.  This will be presentated to your project checkers and all other students in the same project checker group.

The Progress Reports and Presentations are mandatory. Any student unable to attend the presentation with his or her own project checkers should arrange to join another group, and must inform both sets of project checkers, and Student Administration. Any student who cannot attend any of the sessions must present a letter of excuse from the Senior Tutor of their College.

The Progress Reports and Presentations provide a natural opportunity to consider adjustments to your original plan and schedule. In many cases these will be minor. In a few cases, the project checkers may feel that there is a need to discuss any special difficulties which have arisen in a more private setting. In such circumstances they will arrange to meet you individually. You may request an individual meeting yourself if you feel that it is necessary; this request should be put in writing at the end of your written report.

After the presentation your project checker will write a formal report of a few sentences which will be posted to Moodle. 

Progress report contents

The Progress Report should be submitted via Moodle and should contain:

  • Your name and email address.
  • The title of your project.
  • The name of your Supervisor.
  • The name of your Director of Studies.
  • The names of your project checkers. 
  • An indication of what work has been completed and how this relates to the timetable and work plan in the original proposal. The progress report should answer the following questions:
    • Is the project on schedule and if not, how many weeks behind or ahead?
    • What unexpected difficulties have arisen?
    • If the project is behind, what actions have been taken to address this and when will progress be back on track?
    • Briefly, what has been accomplished?
  • It should be possible to understand the Progress Report independently of the original proposal, thus ‘I have completed implementing the wombat module’ rather than ‘I have completed points 1 and 3 in the proposal but not point 2’.

In straightforward cases (entirely on schedule), one side of A4 could suffice. If the project is in difficulties, a new work plan should be included.

Presentation

project checkers will arrange a session which is attended by all students in their project checker group (typically 8 to 10 people), and each member of the group will describe progress made so far in a 5-minute presentation to the whole group. This presentation should be carefully rehearsed.

Note that:

  • The use of slides projected from a laptop is encouraged.
  • No more than four slides can usefully be described in 5 minutes.

The presentation should summarise the progress report.  If the project is on track, then this will be a straightforward case of describing what has been achieved and key work remaining before starting to write up.  Where work is behind schedule, you should focus less on what the difficulties have been and more on what steps you are taking to address them so that you can still deliver a high-quality dissertation.

 

Updated: January 2023