Project Guidelines

The purpose of the project is to allow you to analyze an idea related to the class in some depth. We hope that your project enables you to make measurements or perform computational experiments that explore an idea thoroughly.

The wiki page write-up helps you share your explorations with others, including the people who are assigning your grade. But the target audience is a student who will be taking the class next year. When preparing this material, please remember that over the years many people read these course project pages.

• Please visit MediaWiki's editing help page.

Return to Suggests for Psych 221 or Suggests for Psych 204A.

Organization

Your project write-up should be organized into sections like a research paper. The write-up should include clearly explain your experimental data, computational analyses and conclusions. It is also important that you cite the literature carefully because many people - including people whose work you describe - may well end up reading your page.

For simplicity, we suggest you organize your write-up into one long wiki page but with clearly labeled sections. If you know how to make more complex pages and you wish to show off, we always enjoy a good show.

We propose that you use naming convention for the sections as follows

• Introduction - Motivate the problem. Describe what has been done in the past.

• Background - What is known from the literature.

• Methods - Describe techniques you used to measure and analyze. Describe the instruments, and experimental procedures in enough detail so that someone could repeat your analysis. What software did you use? What was the idea of the algorithms and data analysis?

• Results - Organize your results in a good logical order (not necessarily historical order). Include relevant graphs and/or images. Make sure graph axes are labeled. Make sure you draw the reader's attention to the key element of the figure. The key aspect should be the most visible element of the figure or graph. Help the reader by writing a clear figure caption.

• Conclusions - Describe what you learned. What worked? What didn't? Why? What should someone next year try?

• References - List references. Include links to papers that are online.

• Appendix I - Upload source code, test images, etc, and give a description of each link. In some cases, your acquired data may be too large to store practically. In this case, use your judgement (or consult one of us) and only link the most relevant data. Be sure to describe the purpose of your code and to edit the code for clarity. The purpose of placing the code online is to allow others to verify your methods and to learn from your ideas.

• Appendix II - (for groups only) - Work breakdown. Explain how the project work was divided among group members.