Course Catalogue

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Teams of 4-6 students will design, plan, construct and test an item or system which will be mainly electronic in its key technical aspects and challenging in its scope. The design will be of such a complexity that only as a team can the technical challenges be managed. Teams must integrate aspects of engineering that have previously been taught in a wide range of courses.

Weekly meetings with course co-ordinator to: introduce the projects and on their novel engineering aspects; regularly interact with the project teams; have the teams carry out interim (formative) and final (formative & summative) presentations of their work; give feedback on interim and final presentations.

Mandatory Entry Requirements

None

Recommended Entry Requirements

None

None.

None

30% Report: Final team report with notes from individuals on their part of the design

60% Project Output (Other than dissertation): Extent to which the final product meets the specifications and the quality of the demonstration of the prototypes (50%), confidential peer review to assess individual's contribution to overall success and quality of logbook, including reflective assessment describing individual's contribution (10%)

10% Oral Assessment & Presentation

Reassessments are normally available for all courses, except those which contribute to the Honours classification. For non Honours courses, students are offered reassessment in all or any of the components of assessment if the satisfactory (threshold) grade for the overall course is not achieved at the first attempt. This is normally grade D3 for undergraduate students and grade C3 for postgraduate students. Exceptionally it may not be possible to offer reassessment of some coursework items, in which case the mark achieved at the first attempt will be counted towards the final course grade. Any such exceptions for this course are described below. 

It is not practicable to offer reassessment in any aspect of this course, as each requires practical or group work.

The aims of this course are to:

■ accumulate experience of working in a team focussed on delivering specific objectives and requiring to design, plan, implement and test a challenging technical project;

■ develop technical skills such as software writing, hardware design, construction and testing;

■ make practical use of management and project planning skills;

■ engage in a technically significant project which will require the full team in order to complete in time;

■ work to a design brief and deliver a product which meets challenging specifications within a budget.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ plan the management of a team project;

■ appreciate the value of project management as a tool to deliver results on time and to specification;

■ display initiative in running a project without undue reliance on supervision, for either organisational or technical advice;

■ perform productively in a team, integrating contributions with other team members;

■ keep a personal logbook as a record of technical work;

■ present work in both written report and oral presentation;

■ review a specification, deducing the main functional blocks needed and key technical challenges in building each block;

■ design simple and structured circuits and systems, that can be easily built and tested, and construct and test these circuits and systems;

■ evaluate the performance of systems, and subsystems against the specification, recognise divergence, and perform system modifications and, where appropriate, modifications to the specification;

■ iterate a design from start to finish so that the outcome is a working product.

To ensure that a student will be awarded the credits for a course, he or she must complete the course and reach a minimum level of attainment.  This requires that a student:

■ Take part in the presentations which are part of the assessment.

■ Be present at 90% of the progress meetings.

■ Be noted as making a contribution to the work of the team.

■ Maintain and submit a personal logbook and reflective report.