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Undergraduate Research Practical

• Course Descriptor URP
• Course organiser: John Lee

Introduction

The Undergraduate Research Practical is supposed to

• encourage research-related work by undergraduate students,
• give good students the opportunity to engage with on-going research at the School of Informatics,
• prepare students for their Honours or MInf projects, and
• provide a framework for integrating undergraduate research into the curriculum.

The aim of the course is the participation in a research activity in collaboration with a member of staff or research group. Currently proposed activities can be viewed here.

Assessment will be through a written report on the project.

Interested students should NOT directly contact the proposer of the activity, but should contact the Course Organiser (John Lee). Entry to this course will be strictly by selection. Students will be selected on the basis of established academic merit and their suitability or aptitude for specific activities. Students should submit their name, matric number and a SHORT statement explaining why they would like to do that project. The Course Organiser will then screen students before giving the go-ahead to contact supervisors. Note that the supervisors still have the right to decide whether they accept a student onto the project. Some projects may accommodate more than one student.

In exceptional cases, students may be allowed to self-propose, so if you have a project that you'd particularly like to pursue that isn't covered by one of those on the list, then do please email the Course Organiser about it.

How it works

The project or activity should amount to about 100 hours of work overall, including writing it up, spread through the semester in whatever way suits the student and the project best.

Timetable

• End of Week 1: Student submits a 1-page project schedule which consists of a summary of the project in the student's own words, and a proposed timetable for project activities. The project schedule must be approved by both supervisor and course organiser in order for the student to be allowed to continue with the course.
• Week 6: Group meeting
• Week 10: Project-related research activities finished
• End of Week 12: Project reports due
• Project reports marked by supervisor within 1 week.
• Approval by course organiser within 2 further weeks.

Assessment

The course assessment will be made based on the final report (100%). The main part of the report has a guideline maximum length of about 20 pages (A4, 12pt, single-spaced). The report can draw upon supplementary work possibly undertaken in collaboration (for example artefacts, research poster, research papers), but the report itself must be the student's individual work.

The report may typically contain:

• Title page with abstract (a one or two paragraph summary of the contents).
• Introduction and synopsis, in which the project topic is described and the main results of the collaborative project are briefly summarised.
• Discussion of the work in the project, in which the various sub-problems, solutions and difficulties are examined.
• If appropriate, a description of experiments undertaken, a presentation of the data gleaned from them, and an interpretation of that data.
• Conclusion, in which the main achievements are reviewed, and unsolved problems and directions for further work are presented.
• Bibliography.

Before the submission of the project report, the student may make a presentation to the supervisor and markers and course organiser. This presentation does not make an explicit contribution to the overall mark, but it may inform the markers' assessment of the report.