Coordinator: Simon BOYNTON
Course Description:
Running alongside the Design Projects, this one-semester, 6-credit course will build and consolidate final year BEng(CE), BEng(EE), BEng(ElecE) and BEng(EngSc) Energy Engineering students’ ability to compose technical reports and technical papers, and make technical oral presentations. The focus of this course is on helping students to present the findings of their Technical Project in an effective, professional manner in both written and oral communication. Topics include accessing, abstracting, analyzing, organizing and summarizing information; making effective grammatical and lexical choices; technical report/paper writing; and technical presentations. Assessment is wholly by coursework.
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
- Write a technical paper that demonstrates a grasp of discipline-specific structure, format and language use
- Produce an abstract that explains technical information to specialist and non-specialist audiences in a succinct manner
- Present technical information through integrating graphic and text elements
- Make convincing justifications and claims based on real-life disciplinary sources
- Deliver a technical oral presentation which demonstrates accurate use of language and a grasp of appropriate presentation techniques
Strategies:
- A genre approach to written work is employed emphasizing on acquiring the discipline specific genre through consciousness raising, analysis, and application
- Student’s written work is closely related to their own discipline project
- Video recording of oral presentations is conducted to add a critical element of tension and to facilitate performance improvements through self-reflection
- Compulsory attendance of rehearsals is required in order to gain feedback from the teacher and peers for improvement before the assessments
- Assigned readings and tasks are set for out-of-class and independent learning
Assessment Methods:
(with breakdown of percentage weighting of the various methods)
- Project reports (60%)
- Oral Presentations (30%)
- Independent learning work (10%)