Implementation Phase of Projects

Each of the three major projects types approaches implementation in different ways.  They are listed below, each under a separate heading followed by a description of how to write up the implementation phase of the project. Once again, having a well-defined problem is key here. In fact, you should already be thinking about what your metrics for success are, or in other words what you will evaluate in the last phase of your project. Don't wast time implementing things that aren't on that critical path.
 

1. Design/Prototype/Eval:

Your goal here is to create a prototype of your design that you can use to evaluate in the last phase of the project.  It's not important to create a complete solution.  Instead, what's important is to implement just what you can evaluate.  Before you actually start your implementation, of course you will need to select which of the design approaches that you came up in the previous phase to implement, and that's something that you should talk about among yourselves and with the professor and TAs in order to decide.  Some of the tools available for prototyping include director, visual basic, HTML, and other things.  Depending on the programming skill available in your group, you can choose to create a real application with limited functionality or something that's called a Wizard of Oz application, in which you implement just enough so that someone that hides behind the scenes can actually make the application functional by hand while user studies are going on.
 

2. Tools and Techniques

Your goal here is to develop the actual technology that you have shown there's a reasonable need for in the previous stage of the project.  Here, this is a much more coding heavy project than in many of the other areas.  You're trying to automate that you have shown is being being solved repeatedly by hand or in some other fashion, and you're trying to automate it to the extent that you can demonstrate it reusability.  For example, so that you can use it in either two different settings for two different applications or for two different disabilities or something like that.
 

3. Methods/Models

The last category is in method or model project which involves developing or investigating a model of people with disabilities or a method for doing a user study.  You will have completed a pilot that suggests how your model or method can be applied in the first phase of the project, and the second phase actually involves executing more complex applications of your method or model design.  For example, if you're demonstrating a method, you'll actually apply the method by doing a larger scale user study than most of the other projects will involve.  If you were developing a model, you will show how it can be applied to a situation, and this also involves some sort of study, although it may be more intellectual than involving a large number of users.
 

Writeup

Hand in three pages documenting what you learned in your implementation or test.  This is the kind of documentation that would allow someone else to take what you implemented in the case of an implemenation and actually use it if they wanted to try to reproduce the situation that you are trying to apply it to.  In addition to documentation, you should load your working code into the swiki. In the case of actual source code, this would be more of a documentation style writeup.  In the case of the methods and models, this is a typical experimental writeup where you say what your protocol was, what your users were like, and something about the results although the major analysis will happen in the last phase.  The basic argument in this writeup should remind us of the problem and the specific goals of your project, and show that you solve the problem you set set out to solve. Basically, you are talking about how your solution achieves goals of your project.  You will actually prove that you solved it in the third phase of the project.

The writeup will be graded on the following basis:
     10 pts defining the problem
     10 pts metrics for success
     10 pts grammar, spelling, and organization of document
     30 pts implementation (not the writing, the actual artifact)
     15 pts description of implementation (should support reproducability, or the ability for me to reconstruct/use the artifact,          experiment, etc that you produced)
     15 pts tying it together (in particular, showing how what you implemented solves your problem)