Final Project Deliverables

Now that your proposals are approved, you have the last approximately four and a half weeks of class available to work on final projects.

Regular Checkpoints

Gradescope Checkpoints

To make sure you stay on track, we’ll ask each student to submit two low-stakes checkpoint assignments on Gradescope to let us know how they’re doing with the final project. These checkpoints will be graded roughly the same way as lab checkpoints, and are mostly a way for the course staff to identify ways in which teams are stuck and to help them get un-stuck.

In-Person Checkpoints

Since we’re using live lab for the advanced labs this semester, we’ll also schedule two in-person checkpoints with you to make sure we can provide immediate help and understand how you’re doing on your project. These checkponts will also be graded like the lab checkpoints, and expect for them to be 15-20 minutes long.

Final Report and Presentation

On the last day of class, Tuesday, December 9, your team will submit both a recorded final project presentation and a final project report. The final project presentation should be 5-minutes long and be concise, while covering all of your key results and insights. For the the final report, it should contain:

  1. All code to reproduce the experiments in your project, preferably as a linked GitHub repo.

  2. A write-up in PDF format describing:

    • The objectives you set for your final project.

    • In the case of a performance engineering project, any analysis you performed, microbenchmarks you ran, or baseline implementations you used to determine the performance targets you should try to hit. Since there won’t be a staff baseline of comparison, it will now be your job to provide evidence to convince us (and yourselves!) why the performance you reached is “good.”

    • The design of any code you wrote, including a discussion of your design process and any alternative designs you explored.

    • The results of any experiments you ran.

    • A discussion of your results, including any limitations of your implementation or experiments, and directions for future work.

    • A related work section covering existing publicly-available software, papers, blog posts, etc. relevant to your project.

We intend to share each final presentation and report with the whole class, so that any student who finds another team’s presentation interesting can learn about that team’s work in greater depth.

Overall Timeline

With these checkpoints and deliverables in mind, the approximate timeline for the final project is: