These ``Lab Presentation Instructions'' are taken from an early lab from APPM2360, Spring 1997.
Twenty percent of your lab grade will be deteremined by the presentation of your report. Do the following five things and you will receive full credit for the presentation portion of the lab grade. Note: Only address these presentation issues once you are finished with the lab and ready to print the final draft of the writeup. Performing the following five steps should take less than five minutes and is worth 20% of your grade.These are absolutely the easiest points in the whole lab!
- Item 1: Collapse Unnecessary Cells
It's very important for you to collapse all the Introduction and instructional cells when you format your lab writeup. Printing the lab writeup without collapsing cells will waste a lot of paper. DO NOT WASTE PAPER or your lab grade will suffer considerably!!
Take a minute to scan through this example lab writeup and note the format. The only cells that should be expanded are the Problems section and the title page. When you turn your writeup in, it should be formatted just like this one.
- Item 2: Label Axes on your Plots
Use the AxesLabel option to the plot commands to label your axes. Never include a graph as part of a lab writeup or report without labeling the axes on the graph!
- Item 3: Answer the Questions in Complete Sentences
Treat these lab writeup as formal documents (like a term paper or report). Answer all questions in complete sentences and make use of the formatting capabilities of the Notebook interface (i.e., indentation, underlining, different type faces, special characters). In short, strive to make your answers as readable as possible. See Item #5 for additional formatting requirements
- Item 4: Remove Unnecessary Graphics
You are encouraged to make as many plots as necessary to help you answer the questions in the lab. Visualization is one of the major benefits of using a tool like Mathematica. You will find that storing graphics in your notebooks makes them much bigger. It's quite possible that a single Notebook with graphics will not fit on your floppy disk.
Delete all the unnecessary graphics output cells before storing or printing your notebook. In particular, only print graphics that you use to answer questions in the lab.
- Item 5: Box the cell that contains your answer
The Notebook interface is a very powerful tool for expressing yourself. You should make your answers stand out from the surrounding text and graphics by boxing them, just like you would on your written homework assignment.
You surround a cell with a box by choosing Style->Attributes->Box from the Cell menu. Sometimes the left edge of the box will be missing on the screen, but the whole box will show up when you print it. Try changing the cell style of this box to practice.