Research and Presentation

The Scale

The Specification suggests 2 hours up to books (i.e. a single Hour and a double Hour) and three hours for research (i.e. three weeks’ outers in V Book or one week’s outers in VI Book). So you have to keep it in scale.

Chunkiness and Dimensionality

Some novels develop in a linear fashion by telling you what happens, then telling you what happens next and so on. This would be a 1-dimensional structure.

Others may have two or more parallel strands: what David did on Monday, what Susan did on Monday, what David did on Tuesday, what Susan did on Tuesday and so on. This would be a simple 2-dimensional structure. More complicated 2-dimensional structures might examine several aspects of a single problem, which you could represent as in the right-hand diagram.

You do, of course, have to address the problem of what goes in the boxes. Once you’ve done that, there is a definite order to the scenario on the left hand side. Generally speaking, you would present the information in the boxes in an order that worked from top to bottom, though you might, for example, deal with David’s Tuesday before tackling Susan’s Monday. What you could do as a novelist would be to have David’s Monday on the left-hand side of the double-page spread and Susan’s on the right. Then the reader could take his choice about the order in which he took the information. Usually, though, the author wants to control the order in which the reader gets the information. In the case of working through the tasks involved in preparing for a party, on the other hand (right-hand scenario), it really doesn’t matter in what order they are carried out.

So be aware of the difference between a linear model, in which the information is presented sequentially, and a two-dimensional model in which the receiver picks his own way through it. A film or a lecture imposes linearity. Posters and websites encourage two-dimensional browsing. Novels are generally encountered sequentially, whereas encyclopaedias are not: so books and essays can fall either way, although you’d ordinarily think of them as linear.

Websites can increase the dimensionality of the end-user’s experience. The material in the boxes can have individual words hyper linked to background material, probably opening in an independent window so as not to lose the main thread. Or one can arrange pop-up panels when the cursor hovers over a word. It is rather as if one had one of those Advent Calendars with little flaps that you open on successive days of the month: imagine bit a explanatory text underneath the main text that you can then cover up again when you’ve read it. Essays and textbooks can mimic the effect with footnotes.

The really important point to grasp is that you have got to wind up with a series of boxes and then assemble them into one form or another. You mustn’t end up with an essay. So be thinking all the time about how to write snippets of information on individual sheets that will form, as it were, a pack of cards from which you will ‘deal’ the final product. An individual snippet might have several paragraphs, diagrams, equations and so on. Or it might be a single sentence. It might even have a dimensional structure of its own. But it addresses one compartmentalised aspect of your main information base.

The Presentation

The Specification suggests that this can be ‘any publicly available medium suited to the audience: e.g. an illustrated talk, a web page or a poster.’ Clearly, a PowerPoint presentation would count, but a conventional essay wouldn’t.

One drawback of the PowerPoint presentation is that you present it to the assessor just once and in real time, so that if you fluff your lines you don’t get a second chance. Another drawback is that you can only deliver your material in a linear, 1-dimensional way. A third problem is that the assessor may well ask you questions and you need to understand all your material very thoroughly, and in more detail than you have revealed in the presentation, if you are to cope. Although you will probably not want to adopt this method of presentation, you will be wise to solve this last problem: i.e. don’t use any material, equation, datum etc. that you do not thoroughly understand. Remember that the assessor knows far more physics than you do, and you can very easily get something wrong without realising it and then be penalised for having made mistakes in the physics. Getting the physics wrong is as damaging as not having any in the first place. Make sure you get some physics in there, but let it be straightforward, A level stuff that you are comfortable with.

Posters are popular, and they give you a feeling of having produced something tangible. They can consist of the various snippets literally pasted onto a background card, but this takes quite a long time to do. Alternatively, you can assemble them in a DTP package and then print them out on multiple sheets that you paste together at the edges. Again, final assembly takes some time. Given the extent to which Wykehamists like fine-tuning their work to try to screw the last mark out of it, this latter approach is probably the better one.

If you are good at websites, you will probably choose this option anyway. If you are bad, it may be in your long-term interests to become better. Either way, it is easier for your assessor to give you any advice allowed by the rules if he can see a potentially finished product early in the process. It is much easier to add a bit to or take a bit away from a web site than fully pasted-up poster.

Physics

Make sure that you have a clear view of the relevant physics in mind as you go along. The Young Modulus, elastic/plastic deformation, ductile/brittle fracture, stress, strain, elastic energy, ultimate tensile stress, density and so on all constitute good mechanical physics that you can be quantitative about, and about which you can say both microscopic and macroscopic things. Hardness is a bit more elusive. Resistivity and conductivity are straightforward and relevant electrical matters, although the going gets a bit tougher once you encounter semiconductors. Refractive index and total internal reflection form good optical topics. Again things get hard if you try to delve into transparency/reflectivity. Try to avoid qualitative hand-waving. And try really hard to avoid orbitals and chemistry. You don’t understand them, and they detract from rather than add to your work, because they clutter it up with what amounts to padding, and you end up losing marks in the ‘focus’ section.

Assembling the material from sources

(Remember the ‘five hour’ rule.)

The web is an obvious source, but you should try to use a couple of books and a magazine as well to provide ‘a good range’. You should certainly use a data book as an obvious way of finding a discrepancy.

I should be inclined to make a note of every site you visit and why you left it. If you come upon something useful select it and copy it at once into a scrapbook file. If there’s a concept that puzzles you, pop it into Google, or look it up on the A-Z section of the CD. Make a note of what you find in your scrapbook. The scrapbook with its deletions and supplementary searches provides the evidence for [DR].

It is vital that you use the Internet and books as research tools to answer specific questions that have occurred to you and NOT as a source of ‘inspiration’. Otherwise you spend hours and hours not making any headway at all. A huge list of sites visited is usually a sign of weakness.

Context and focus

Here is a possible way into it.

Look around you and select an object (A) that is made of a single material (A). Not a desk, for example, because it’s got metal screws holding together bits of wood. But the desk top would qualify, as would one of the screws. Now select a different object (B), made of a different material (B). And a third object (C), made of a third material (C). Write these down in a list.

Ask yourself whether object A could have been made from materials B or C. And vice versa. If not, why not. What is it about material (A) that makes it suitable for object (A)? You are now thinking on the right lines, and before long – after ten minutes, say – you will have been able to choose an object and material to work with. The easy thing is to go for something made from a material you already know something about, like copper, but then you’ll get ‘suitable’ ringed under [DL(i)]. Selecting wood or reinforced concrete as a material may well earn the ‘challenging’ mark, but you will have to be a much better physicist to get a grip on the essential features within the five hour period. On the whole I’d sacrifice this mark!

Action Plan

You now have the basis of a presentation. Here is a list of things to do. At each stage, consult the criterion grid (specified in square brackets), checking all three statements.

• Decide what object you are interested in making. [DL(i)]

• Decide what material you will use for making it. [DL(i)]

• Think about the method of presentation. Read through the rest of this list. Sketch a thumbnail view, like that on the first page of this document (you can always alter things later). Write a list of the things you will do (it may not look unlike the next half page of this document!) [AL(i)]

• List the physical properties of the material, finding the information from more than one source so that discrepancies can appear (this is the first use of the Internet & books) [BR]

• Identify those properties relevant to the choice of this material for this purpose [CL(ii)]

• Prepare snippets covering the basic physics involved in the definition and measuring of those properties (second use of the internet and books). [BL]

• Prepare a snippet discussing how the microscopic structure of the material affects the values of the macro properties (third use of sources) [BL]

• Prepare a snippet discussing what values of the properties are required in order to satisfy the needs of the application (this comes mostly from your head rather than sources) [BL, CL(ii)]

• Write a short piece explaining why you have omitted some information. If the final presentation is going to operate at a less sophisticated intellectual level than you are actually capable of (in favour of audience impact) then you might include some more advanced stuff here, and say why you are omitting it. Then you get brownie points for [BL], [AR(ii)] and [CL(i)].

• Assemble your snippets into their potential final form, according to the plan. Write any additional snippets that are needed to make the whole thing coherent. [CR(i)]

• Make sure that the snippets tell the reader where the info has come from as well as making sure that the list of sources says what each was used for. [AR(i)]

• Write in good English, spell checked, and observe all the conventions set out in ‘Coursework Reports’ on AJPA’s website. [CR(ii)]

• Assemble the final product.

• Assemble a dossier of the source-use scrapbook, the thumbnails, the plan of action, the information-omitting strategy, the bibliography and the discrepancies+discussion. None of this stuff should appear in the final product. [DR]

Throughout the whole exercise, keep the Five Hour Rule in mind!

 Tony Ayres

April 2005