Design and Senior Project Report Preparation
Since the graduation work will include the information and experiences gained over a long period of study, a well-organized report will be a useful resource for those interested in the subject. For this reason, some rules should be taken into account in the preparation of the content of the report.
Preface
This is the section where a person who has completed a long study writes their opinions, independent of the technical and scientific content. In addition, in this section, people and organizations that received information, resources, etc. during the final study should be thanked. In this section, the person who has completed the study can also thank their family and friends who supported and helped them.
Title
The title of the report should be determined in a way that gives an idea about the subject to the readers. The title should neither be too short nor too long to distract attention. For example, “Data Mining” is a general title that cannot give enough idea about the work because there is more than one method in data mining. “An Application in Classification with Decision Tree Techniques in Data Mining” is a complicated title because it contains unnecessary words. “Decision trees in Data Mining” is a sufficient and understandable title to introduce the subject.
Abstract
The most read sections of a graduation report are the abstract, introduction and conclusion sections. People who only want to get general information about the subject usually read these three sections. For this reason, a brief of the study and the important results obtained should be written repeatedly in the abstract, introduction and conclusion sections.
The purpose of the abstract is to provide the reader with a general idea about the subject of the study. The first paragraph of the abstract should introduce the subject of the study. In the other paragraphs, the scope and objectives of the study should be explained step by step, the methods used should be briefly introduced, and the main results should be given.
Since the abstract describes a completed study, the expression should be in the passive voice, such as “done, completed.”
The Text
The report text should be written by dividing it into main sections to ensure that the reader can easily follow the report and easily access the information he/she is interested in. The first section of each report should be the introduction, and the last section should be the conclusion.
Introduction
The introduction should include sufficient basic information to enable the reader to understand and evaluate the study without having to read other publications on the subject, and should also briefly explain the need for and purpose of the study. The reason for choosing this topic and why it is important should be well emphasized in the introduction.
The structure of the introduction section should be as follows:
· The definition of the study topic should be made once again.
· Bitirme çalışmasının anlaşılabilmesi için bilinmesi gereken ön bilgiler varsa anlatılmalıdır.
· If there is any preliminary information that needs to be known in order to understand the report, it should be explained.
· The methods used in the study and the reason for choosing these methods should be explained.
The next chapters of the report should be briefly introduced to make it easier for the reader to decide which chapters to read.
Other chapters
In the sections following the introduction of the report, the work that is outlined in the introduction should be explained in detail. Since these sections will be for those who want to have detailed information about the work or who want to do work on the same subject, the work should be explained step by step without skipping important information. Generally, those who read the report try to get an idea about that section by reading the first paragraph of each main section. For this reason, the first paragraph of each main section should introduce that section in outline.
In order to make the report easier to evaluate and understand, the narrative should be reinforced with figures and tables. If the report is an experimental study, the results obtained from the experiments should be given in tables to facilitate the evaluation of the results. In non-experimental studies, there should definitely be an “Application” section, except for special cases. In this section, how the implemented system was applied and the results obtained during the application phase should be explained. In the application section, care should be taken to ensure that the number of data is large enough to allow generalizations.
Conclusion
The conclusion section is the section where the results obtained from the study are evaluated. The structure of this section should be as follows:
· The study topic should be defined and the methods used should be summarized.
· The results obtained should be expressed in clear and simple sentences.
· In experimental studies, the main results obtained from the evaluation of different experimental results should be explained and, if possible, generalizations should be made based on these results.
· In order to guide those who want to work on this subject, the report should explain to what extent the initially determined goal has been achieved, the strengths and weaknesses of the study, and suggestions, if any, for future studies should be stated.
