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Project Proposal

Create a document that proposes two potential research projects that you are interested in studying as part of the course. Topics should be focused on studying one particular phenomenon or design, as opposed to projects that might span an entire thesis. However, students are encouraged to pick a topic that might form a subset of their thesis research.

Try to pick divergent topics as part of your selection rather than projects that are small increments on each other. This way we have more options of projects to choose from.

Contents: Each topic's description should include the following details (not necessarily sections, as each could simply be comprised of a few sentences):

  1. Introduction - describe the context of the research space briefly
  2. Related Work - without doing a thorough literature review, what do you know about this space? what has been done that you know of?
  3. Research Problem - describe what the research problem is in this space and why it needs to be addressed
  4. Research Method - what will you do to solve the problem, e.g., conduct a study, create a design
  5. Outcome - what will be the outcome of your project? a design? a set of study results? if study results, what will they illustrate?

Length and Format: The document should be between 2 pages in length (one page per topic / project idea). You may choose any format you wish. I am less interested in your document's format and length and more interested in ensuring you pick the right topic to study and that it is doable within the term.

Submission deadline:Due in Week 4's class. Email the proposal to Carman as a PDF file and also bring a printed copy to class.

Evaluation: You will be evaluated on your ability to concisely document a research problem and method for solving or addressing it. You will not be graded on whether or not you have chosen bad project ideas (so don't be afraid to be risky).

Project ideas will be evaluated as a part of the assignment and then discussed with the instructor where you will jointly pick the project that is most applicable to the course content. This will become your focus for your course project.

Example project proposal: here.