IS43400 Fall 2010 - Professor Futrelle
Version of 11/29/2010
FLASH: Project 4 deadline extended to 11:59PM, Wednesday, November 24.
Contents
Advice on formatting your references
Project 1: Three suggestions due Thursday 9/23, 5PM
Project 2: Due Monday, 10/4, at 5PM
Project 3: Due Monday, 11/1, 5PM (updated 11/5/2010)
EXTENDED DEADLINE Project 4: The penultimate version. Due Wednesday 11/24, 11:59PM
Student project presentations I - Tuesday, 11/30
Student project presentations II - Friday, 12/3
Project 5: Final version due Monday 12/6, 5PM
Your semester project is the largest single assignment in the course. You will develop your project in a series of stages. I will give you feedback on each stage. In addition I will schedule two one-on-one meetings with each of you to discuss your project, one early on, to get things started, and another later, when you are well into developing your project. I will set up a separate Doodle schedule for each. of the two meetings.
You should create a single Project Google doc that will eventually contain your project writeups for each of your stages. Insert a Table of Contents to guide the reader.
The class-by-class schedule lists the following project due dates. These are expanded on below. Not all details of every stage are filled in yet.
NOTE: I am not suggesting you follow my writing suggestions literally. Ultimately, you are the one who decides on the best way to do your writeup. But here are my suggestions - consider them as guidelines.
You should begin with an Abstract of your report. The abstract should briefly describe the major tasks you've undertaken, including some information about what you have found, from data and interviews. In a following Introduction section you can expand your discussion, including mentioning points you have discovered in papers about what you are studying and about HCI techniques and most importantly an overview of your project design, execution, and results.
Next should come some paragraphs describing the relevant content of papers, books, and articles.
A section is needed about the design of your project, describing each task briefly.
A section about your artifact should come next, e.g., a camera, on-line ordering, your software application, etc.
And finally, sections devoted to more detail about what you did and what you found - the design, execution, and results of your various tasks.
The conclusion section allows you to reflect on how your project went and can re-emphasize your main points.
When you put URLs into your reports, make sure that they work for other people (me, for example) at other locations. Try to avoid putting in a version that is tied to a library login. For example, the "Skinput" paper is available through ACM, which requires library access or member access and generates a long URL that may be specific to your login, or is a link to a temp page, no longer there. But Scholar also points to a PDF of the paper that anyone can use. That's the URL to include. When I copy that link in Firefox (right click or ctl-click for a menu), I get:
http://www.techhouse.org/~dmorris/publications/HarrisonSkinputCHI2010.pdf
If no PDF is available and no useful URL, just give a full and proper citation followed by: (institutional or member access), e.g.,
This reference item that I got from the ACM portal, though I think it's really awkward:
Harrison, C., Tan, D., & Morris, D. (2010). Skinput: appropriating the body as an input surface. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems.
A better format can be constructed from the EndNote item you can download (in Google Scholar, be sure to set your preferences to include the EndNote or other biblio items,
%0 Conference Paper
%1 1753394
%A Chris Harrison
%A Desney Tan
%A Dan Morris
%T Skinput: appropriating the body as an input surface
%B Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems
%@ 978-1-60558-929-9
%C Atlanta, Georgia, USA
%P 453-462
%D 2010
%R 10.1145/1753326.1753394
%I ACM
and would simply be,
Harrison, C., Tan, D., & Morris, D. (2010). Skinput: Appropriating the body as an input surface. CHI '10, pages 453-462.
I don't like the way the lowercase "appropriating" so I capitalized it above. Also, "CHI '10" is the way it's described in the ACM Digital Library Portal.
My best advice: Look at the formats that authors use in the conference papers you have read, or other full-length papers you are using in your semester project.
When all is said and done, links can die, so the citation text itself is the ultimate identifier.
This stage appears to come up with an early deadline. But I will spend all of the Tuesday 9/14 discussing projects and how to get started. The course homepage lists a number of earlier projects that students have succesfully carried through. For the three, just choose topics you find interesting. At this stage you don’t need to understand exactly what will be involved in carrying out your project. That will become clear as you proceed.
Choose three quite different project suggestions. 100 words or more per choice would be the minimum length. I will edit my comments into your Project doc, along with a grade. Additional email discussions or one-on-one conversations could help you come up with some good suggestions.
For each of the three suggestions you should include some remarks about,
Project 2 is due a week-and-a-half after Project 1. This should give you time to home in on a project. Focus is to be on your one chosen project topic. Expand on each of the bullet points listed for Project 1. 75 to 100 words for each bullet point would be sufficient.
Your goal at this stage is to describe in detail all the things you plan to do in your project. You have already heard a number of the report organization ideas in our class on Tuesday, 10/26. Your Project Report #3 should include the material described in the bulleted list below, each described in a minimum of 250 words. You have read a number of professional papers in this course. Use the best of them as models for your project reports. I’m referring to CHI papers, not the more informal ACM Interactions articles.
Hopefully you will have made some concrete progress, so your report will describe more than just plans. Please get your reports to me as early as you can on Monday, so I can discuss them in class on Tuesday to help every one of you produce the best project you can.
Share a Google Presentation about your project with me, of between three and four slides. You can of course make further changes to it, right up to the last minute, since it’s a shared doc, in the cloud.
Your goal at this stage is to show concrete progress on all the things you plan to do in your project. Your Project Report #4 should include the material described in the bulleted list below, each described in a minimum of 400 words on average. The total length you should try or in your final project report is a minimum 3600 words - in conventional terms, that’s seven pages of single space 11 point type. This doesn’t count figures, graphs, and your bibliography (reference list), which are additional Use the full-length CHI papers as your models, not the more informal ACM Interactions articles.
These will be similar to the Flash talks but more extensive in terms of content, number of slides, and time for discussions: A six minute talk plus two minutes for questions, for each student. Approximately ten slides for a single student’s presentation.
Your number one question: What’s the order of the presentations? Since the people at the end of the alphabet are always left behind, the order will be from Z to A.
You are to continue to deepen and lengthen your Project 5 reports with special emphasis on your final results, discussions of your results, and your final conclusions. An additional 25% beyond your Project 4 should be about right.