IMPORTANT NOTE: While we are encouraging you to use tools like chatGPT to generate code for your project, you may not use AI tools to generate text for your writing. We want you to practice your writing and communication skills on your own. Your submissions must be entirely your own text.

Writing Assignments

Senior design enables you to focus on your own project, and push your technical capabilities through it. However, it is very important to learn how to successfully communicate what you’re doing, and why it is cool with the outside world. Thus, a significant component of this class is learning and practicing the non-technical skills of writing and presentation.
An important aspect of Senior Design (SD) is gaining experience writing a document that holistically evaluates how your project relates to the world. This includes how the project should be presented to others, how it relates to the commercial and competitive landscape, and how it will impact the world. This page spells out the requirements for a series of writing assignments you must complete for SD.For each of these writing assignments, make sure to follow the submission rules on the main SD webpage (i.e., submit PDF on Blackboard or the team Github repo as specified).

Writing 1 (Individual) - Elevator Pitch Executive Summary

Each student must complete this assignment individually (no collaboration) and submit on Blackboard.
For this assignment you will write an executive summary for your senior design project with the goal of pitching the project. That is, pretend that you are seeking funding/approval for your project from an investor or a philantropic foundation or your manager or your research supervisor and write a compelling one page summary (11pt font, single spaced) . We have provided a rubric for Writing 1.

You should convince the (non-technical) reader that your project solves an important problem, overcomes difficult technical challenges, and will have an audience (users) or social purpose. The reader should feel that you understand the problem area and have some interesting ideas for solving the problem (and current solutions fall short of your goal). Typical content (based on Small Business Innovation Grants from NSF, VC Initial seed funding or Series A funding pitches etc.) in an elevator pitch are:

Customer: describe the expected customer for your project. What customer needs or market pain points are you addressing?
Value Proposition: what is the key differentiator of your product/technology?
Innovation: Describe your innovation. What aspects are original, unusual, novel, disruptive or transformative compared to the current state of the art?
Broader societal impact: is there a broader societal need you are trying to address with this project?

Writing 2 (Individual) - Technical Summary

Each student must complete this assignment individually (no collaboration) and submit on Blackboard. You are limited to 1000 words.
Now that you have explained (in Writing 1) why your project is valuable and how it will be used, you need to convince the reader that it is technically feasible and innovative. While Writing 1 was written for a non-technical audience, this Technical summary is written for a technical manager – they have the technical savvy but does not want to see unnecessary details.
The technical summary should describe the innovation in sufficient technical depth for a technically knowledgeable reader to understand why it is innovative and how it can provide benefits in the target applications. Supplement this description with any necessary background information.
To get started, you should refer to the project proposal (submitted earlier in the course) and the technical design that your team has developed (with the project mentors). We expect that you will need to refer (and use) some of the technical design that was developed in collaboration with your team members. However, you should focus on the technical component that you are responsible for when describing the innovations and technical plan. Specifically, some of the aspects that should be addressed in the technical summary are:

Technical Innovation: Describe the technologies that will go into your project. What exactly is technically novel about the project? How does this compare to what already exists out there?
Key objectives: Describe the key objectives to be accomplished during the project, including the questions that must be answered to determine the technical and commercial feasibility of the proposed concept
Technical Feasibility: What existing tools and technologies can you use to build your project? How can you be confident that it’s do-able?
Costs, Risk and Risk Mitigation: What is the development cost in terms of hardware and software? How much code do you need to write (and why)? What external libraries / dependencies do you have? A typical question is “What are the project milestones and a timeline for achieving these milestones?” and in this Writing assignment you can provide a few sentence summary based on the project planning you worked on in September.

Writing 3 (Team) - Product Requirements Document

Each team must complete this assignment together and submit it on Blackboard.

A Product Requirements Document consists of 2 major components: Proposal and Specifications. The Executive Summary writing assignment covered the Proposal section and the Technical Summary writing assignment began the Specifications section. This writing assignment will focus on addressing the Specifications, both for the Product and Technical aspects.

The goal of this writing assignment is to communicate the expected user experience and technical design as it will be upon project completion. You will produce a combination of written details, visual artifacts, and diagrams describing the user flows and architecture of the product or system you are building.

The Product specifications should include the following details: user stories, flow diagrams, and mockups/wireframes.

User Stories: What are the most critical user stories for the project? This should be a list of all user stories. Remember that user stories are formatted as such: As a [persona], I would like to [functionality] so that I can [benefit]. (eg. As a Product Manager, I would like to set the priority of the ticket as High, Medium, or Low, so that the engineering team members know which tickets are more important.)
Flow Diagrams: What are the key steps the user takes when interacting with your project? This should be a diagram representation of those steps and what happens upon success or failure of each step.
Mockups/Wireframes: What are the visual artifacts of what the end user will see when using your product/system? If you have a UI component that drives the user experience, this section should be images of those UI screens. If you have an API component that drives the user experience, this section should document the API UX: authentication setup (if applicable), list of all the API endpoints, code examples, and details on how to use each endpoint.

The Technical specifications should include the following details: architecture/system diagrams, external APIs and frameworks used, and algorithms built.

Architecture/System Diagrams: How do all of the individual components of the project interact with each other? Now that you have each described your respective components of the project, this section should be the highest level view of how all of those components interact with each other.
External APIs and Frameworks: This should be a list of all of the external APIs and frameworks that you call on or use to build your project. Each item should have a detailed description of why and how it is used in your project.
Algorithms: This should be a detailed description of the main algorithmic components of your application.

Writing 3 example template
Writing 3 example from last year

Note: There is no length requirement but the assignment submission should include all details listed under Product Specifications and Technical Specficiations.

Writing 4 (Team) - Revised Product Requirements Document

Updated 10/29/24: This assignment has been revised since the website was originally posted, so please check carefully!

In this assignment you should revise your Product and Technical Specifications document from Writing 3 based on our feedback and the progress you have made on your project. We expect to see significant changes in response to our comments, as well as your own ideas on how to make the document stronger.