Project Management and Laboratory Notebooks
Last Updated January 10 2008
Weekly project meetings between project groups and course instructor will be held. Project management will be assisted by maintain a weekly status report and a laboratory notebook.
Status Report
The purpose of the status report is to document the current status and short-range plans of your project.
- Contents of a status report
- Status of items being worked. Accomplishments, holdups, estimated time for completion.
- Anticipated items, plans for accomplishment, estimated time for completion.
- An electronic copy of the weekly status report will be sent to the instructor by 5PM on the day preceding the weekly project meeting.
- A hard-copy of the weekly status report will appear in the laboratory notebook.
Notebooks
All students in ME 430 are required to take part in maintaining a lab notebook. There will be one laboratory notebook per group. Notebooks should be arranged so that the decisionmaking steps underlying all aspects of experimental design, data collection, and data analysis can be recovered by someone unfamiliar with your progress in the laboratory. As such, it is imperative that you review the following checklist before coming to class every week to insure that notebooks adequately represent your progress.
Format:
1.Notebooks must be bound.
2.Notebooks must have numbered pages.
3.Notebooks should have the name of your project group on the cover along with the name of all group members.
5.Notebooks must have a Table of Contents. (Remember to leave several blank pages at the beginning for future entries.)
6.The Table of Contents must document all phases of the project.
7.All entries must be dated and signed.
Weekly Housekeeping:
1.An entry should be made after every lab period.
2.A current status reportshould appear weekly.
Experiment Design:
1.Notebooks should contain sketches of all laboratory setups which have been contemplated and/or built. These should be clearly annotated.
2.Notebooks should contain supporting calculations for apparatus design decisions.
3.Copies of all memos to shop personnel and laboratory technicians should be included in your lab notebook.
Data Acquisition and Analysis:
1.Uncertainty analysis should be documented in your lab notebook before formal data collection begins.
2.Where practicable, data sheets and computer source code listings should be organized in your lab notebook before each experiment.
3.All experimental data in its raw and reduced form should be organized in as straightforward a manner as possible. If data is contained on extensive computer files, the names of these files should be meticulously indexed.
4.Results of all analysis should be maintained in your lab notebook.
5.A list of observations and conclusions should accompany all data runs.