ENCN493-15S2 (C) Semester Two 2015

Project

30 points

Details:
Start Date: Monday, 13 July 2015
End Date: Sunday, 15 November 2015
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Sunday, 26 July 2015
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Sunday, 11 October 2015

Description

Engineering Research Project

The third professional year project is very different to all other final year courses. It is not based on
formal lectures, laboratories and tutorials, but instead allows you to explore a problem that interests you under the close supervision of an academic staff member. The vast majority of students who undertake a project find it a very rewarding experience.

Students who are wishing to pursue future postgraduate study will see the project as an excellent
opportunity to sample the postgraduate research environment, and to explore possible avenues for their future research.

In 2013 the third pro project became a compulsory course for all civil and natural resources
engineering students. For the majority of you it will be a full year course (ENCN493W) that makes up 25% of your final year of study. If you are undertaking a study exchange in the first semester of your final year then you will most likely undertake the project in a compressed format in semester 2 (ENCN493S2). The EFTS value of the one semester project is also 0.25.

All projects, with a few exceptions due to special circumstances, are undertaken in pairs. This
approach has a number of advantages. Firstly group projects enable more ambitious projects to be tackled; secondly, the skill of working as part of a team is seen as very important by future employers; and thirdly the number of projects (and accompanying resources) that need to be made available is substantially less than if the projects were done individually.

The culmination of the project will be the CNRE Research Conference 2015 to be held at the end of
the academic year. This conference attempts to emulate the type of environment you would encounter if you attended a conference either as a professional engineer or as a researcher. You and your partner will present the results of your work to an audience of your peers and you will have the opportunity to hear about the research of your fellow students. Industry guests will be present at the conference. In keeping with our intention to emulate a real conference there will be an invited keynote speaker to launch the conference.

Learning Outcomes

  • Objectives
    The third professional project is designed to provide you with an opportunity to:
  • undertake a substantial, challenging and open-ended engineering project,
  • experience working in a research environment,
  • develop independent research and problem solving skills,
  • derive an appropriate methodology for a particular problem,
  • plan and undertake a project as part of a team,
  • manage a project with time and budget constraints,
  • analyse and interpret data from the literature, modelling, or experiments,
  • experience a typical engineering conference, and
  • demonstrate your communication skills through writing and orally presenting a conference
    paper, and presenting a conference poster.

Prerequisites

Completion of Second Professional year or Subject to approval of the Director of Studies.

Restrictions

ENCI493, ENCI494, ENCN494

Course Coordinator

Roger Nokes

Course Administrator

Leigh Davidson

Assessment

Assessment of the project will take a number of forms and will involve the supervisor, an independent assessor (someone not on the supervisory team). In addition the student members of the project team will provide the supervisor with guidance on some aspects of the assessment. In general terms the assessment is designed to address four key areas: research quality, communication ability, professionalism and individual contribution. Some of these aspects will be judged on the team’s performance while others will be based on individual performance.

The supervisor will provide the marks for the professionalism and individual contribution components based on their observations of, and interactions with, the project team over the duration of the project. The communication component will be judged by the supervisor and assessor based on the final written conference paper, and by the panel of judges for the oral presentation and the poster. The research quality component will be judged by the supervisor and assessor based on the conference paper.

“The CNRE Research Conference 2015”

One of the objectives of the project is to provide you with the experience of working within a research environment. In order to make this experience more realistic the project will attempt to simulate the process of undertaking research that leads to the presentation of your results at a research conference.

This conference, the “CNRE Research Conference 2015”, will be held at the end of the academic year. Each project team will produce a poster, intended for a general audience, prepare a concise conference paper to be included in the conference proceedings, and finally deliver an oral presentation at the conference itself.

The assessment for the project is based on this conference model and details of the assessment
schedule can be found in Appendix A. The milestones associated with the assessment are listed in
Appendix B.

Both the posters and the oral presentations will be judged by expert panels and prizes will be awarded for the most outstanding posters and presentations.

Attendance at the conference is compulsory for all students.

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $1,976.00

International fee $9,450.00

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.

For further information see Civil and Natural Resources Engineering .

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