Your project proposal should be at least 2 pages long. It should include a clear description of:

• The developmental architecture you will be testing.
• The environment and robot you will use in the experiment.
• Your hypothesis and expected outcome.
• How you will analyze the results to demonstrate that some kind of development has actually occurred.

Be ready to demonstrate your robot and environment for the class on April 8th. Your program does not need to be completed at this point, but be prepared to describe the developmental architecture you will use, your planned experiment, and your hypotheses.

You should plan to give a 30 minute presentation about your project. Each group will be assigned a date to speak during April 22-May 1. It may be the case that you are still running experiments at this point. However, you should have some preliminary results to report. If it is a team project, then each team member should speak for an equal portion of the time. You can use openoffice, which is available on the CS system, or powerpoint to create your presentation. You should follow these guidelines (put together by Tia Newhall) when creating your talk.

Your paper should include the following:

• A short abstract of 200 to 300 words summarizing your findings.
• An introduction which contrasts your study with other related work.
• A detailed description of your experiments. There should be enough information so that someone could redo your experiments.
• An explanation of the results. Use figures and tables where appropriate.
• A discussion of the significance of the results.
• A bibliography.

Your grade will not be based on whether or not your experiment succeeds. Negative results are also useful. Your grade will be based on the design and execution of the experiment as well as the thoroughness and readability of the paper. You do not turn in any programs. Email me a pdf version of your paper.

The purpose of writing a research paper is to communicate your discoveries to others. It is important to explicitly acknowledge how your work relates to other work. This can be done either with a direct quotation from another source or by summarizing the key points from another source. You should avoid paraphrasing another source as this can border on plagiarism. When summarizing another source, explain the essential information in your own words.

When using the exact language from another source, you must use quotation marks. Or if you are using a passage that is more than four lines long, indent and single space the passage without quotation marks. For a direct quotation, provide a reference with a page number. When summarizing another source, you should also provide a reference, but a page number is not necessary.