Overview

For each lab you will be submitting a lab report that details the procedures and results you encountered while working on your lab.

This page outlines exactly what your report should include and contains instructions on how it should be formatted.

In general, your lab report should include enough information to reproduce the lab and your results without the lab handout and should demonstrate that you understand what you were learning and whether or not you learned it.

This page describes only the basic components of a lab report that you should have learned from your general education requirements and/or prerequisite courses. If you are still confused about the components of a lab report, please feel free to contact the course staff or consult any of the linked resources under Helpful Links

Submission

Canvas submissions should have at least 2 files:

• report.pdf
• project.zip (entire project exported from CCS)
• project2.zip (if necessary)

Lab reports are submitted on Canvas one week after the last section of the corresponding lab.

Do not forget to submit your code in the submission

Contents

The report should broadly contain the following sections:

0. Checkoff sheet contains:
   • clear photo of your checkoff sheet
1. Introduction contains:
   • an overview of the procedures conducted in the lab
2. Background contains:
   • a description of all modules, hardware, and software tools used
   • background information on any techniques or protocols that feature prominently in the lab
3. Goals contains:
   • high-level descriptions of each checkoff task to complete.
     • each task described should include a statement on what concepts or techniques you should be learning as you complete each task
4. Methods contains:
   • implementation details for each checkoff task that you completed
     • this includes any screenshots/images that the lab manual explicitly asked you to collect as part of checkoff
     • description of software architecture used to implement firmware state machines, etc.
5. Discussion contains:
   • challenges that were encountered during lab and how they were overcome
     • if they were not overcome, explain what was attempted to resolve them
6. Contributions contains:
   • a high-level description of tasks done by each team member / how each member contributed to completing the lab
   • some tasks may be completed collaboratively by both team members
     • e.g. debugging, pair programming, etc.

Quality

As upperclassmen, any part of your lab report that is hand-written and/or hand-drawn is unacceptable. Block diagrams, or figures should be included as necessary to help illustrate your concepts and show us that you understand what the lab was about and what you learned.

For quality reports, we strongly recommend using a template commonly used for writing journal articles. You can find the template files for IEEE Transactions and ACM SIG uploaded on Canvas under Files -> templates, or (if you are so inclined) you can create your report on Overleaf using this IEEE template or this ACM SIG template.

Helpful Links

• Purdue Chemistry Lab Resources - Parts of a Lab Report
• NCSU - Parts of a Laboratory Report
• U of T Writing Advice - The Lab Report

Note: the above resources contain similar components with some differences, and you should extrapolate what is expected (a hypothesis section is unnecessary). In addition, no components of your report should be hand- drawn or hand-written (this is generally considered unprofessional).