1st Report Format

What sections do we need to cover in our first report, and when is it due? The foreword and summary sections are submitted individually, do these two sections also need to be included in the final report?

So, this lab report is going to be due at the beginning of next week's lab, and yes, you will submit a foreword and summary with the final group report (unless they tell you otherwise tomorrow in lecture). As far as the sections are concerned, I believe that they are going to cover a bit of that in lecture tomorrow, but to some extent this is left for you to figure out. You'll obviously have the foreword and summary to begin, and then you will want to address the tasks that were laid out in the scenario letter. I've already heard a lot of questions from some students in the lab about this and it's a very legitimate concern for all of you. The 'clients' didn't really provide you with any sort of specific reporting format in the scenario letter so as of right now, you as the engineer have a great deal of discretion to decide the best way to present the data to the client to satisfy their requests. I know I'm intentionally being a bit vague here, but that is somewhat the point of the exercise. It's probably reasonable to have your foreword/summary, followed by some kind of discussion and results section where you present the data comparing the measurement devices (could be broken up into sub-sections, etc.) and follow up at the end with conclusions (supported by your data, of course) that effectively and concisely address the issues in the scenario letter. Hopefully this will help out and give you some guidance in how to get started on the report, but hopefully they will address some of these issues tomorrow in lecture as well.

the assignment reads: "Each student individually prepares a heading and foreword and uploads it to the C-Tools course site." It doesn't say we need a summary for this lab is this correct?

Yes sorry about that...I probably should have clarified that. I used the wrong terminology when I threw the word summary out there so flippantly.

When in doubt about the TechCom side of the report, always defer to what the TechCom people are telling you, because they have the final say on that part and they are also the ones grading it.