(Latest revision 12/28/2000)

Team Project Assignment for Communication Networks: CS 3000

You will form two-person teams for the class projects.

There is a list of topic suggestions in the document called projectIdeas. I will make additions to the list as ideas occur to me.

YOUR SOURCES

You may use high-quality publications and high-quality sites on the web as sources of information for your project.

When searching for articles, be sure to look at issues of the following magazines in our library: Communications of the ACM and IEEE Computer. Also, browse through the periodicals section of the stacks for other ACM and IEEE publications.

YOUR TOPIC

You must choose a topic with a strong relation to networking and you must present an in-depth report on your topic.

If you wish, you may choose to do a project with a considerable hands-on component. For example, some students using our textbook at a different college built a client-server application that allows a client to play a game such as tic-tac-toe over a network.

On the other hand, you may choose to do a project without a significant hands-on component.

YOUR GRADE

Three things will determine your project grade: Your team's oral presentation of the project activities and results (30%), a handout distributed at the beginning of the presentation (30%), and a web site version of the presentation (40%). Both people on your team will receive the same grade.

DUE DATES

Finalize your project idea as early as is practicable. You must have a finalized project idea not later than the sixth day of instruction (Tuesday, January 16). You must obtain my approval for your idea by the end of that day. Between now and then, keep me posted on what you are considering to do for your project so that I can give you necessary feedback.

You will make your oral presentations during the period reserved for the course final exam: Thursday, February 1, from 9:00 to 12:00. The entire class is required to attend all the presentations.

THE CONTENT OF YOUR PRESENTATION

Your presentation must be between 15 and 25 minutes in length. In your presentation, tell what your topic is and what is important about your topic. Report what you did, what your sources of information were, what you hoped to learn, what you actually did learn, and what you feel remains for you to learn. Report on any other interesting outcomes. Be imaginative and original. Include some helpful audio/visual aids. Your presentation will be judged by the depth of your research, the quality of your content, and the effectiveness with which you communicate. Be prepared to take a few questions from the course instructor and the rest of the audience after you complete your presentation.

THE CONTENT OF YOUR HANDOUT

The body of your handout must be more than one page and less than three pages in length. It must contain more than 500 words and fewer than 2000. It must summarize what you want your audience to know about the topic and help them with their note-taking.

Attach a list of references to the handout. This list must contain complete citations of all sources of information you used to assemble your project. See the document howToCite for important additional information.

THE TIMING OF YOUR HANDOUT

You must distribute the handout at the beginning of the presentation. If not, you get a zero for that component of the presentation.

TIMING AND CONTENT OF YOUR WEB PAGE

Before the last class session of the Winter Term begins, you must make available a web page containing the core material of your presentation. We will arrange to publish the pages on the CS department web server. See the files HTML-help and homepagePattern.html for some help getting started on making web pages. Also, please bring this topic up in class where we can take care of the rest of the details. For full credit on your web page, be sure to appropriately exploit links to relevant web sites relating to your topic.