Final Paper (Summer 2020)

At the end of the semester, you will submit a paper on your project. The primary intention of this paper is to summarize your work for the semester in a clear, comprehensive fashion, and allow for an easy transition to submitting your project for publication if you so desire. You are not required to submit the paper to the conference or journal, of course, but the goal is to make it as straightforward as possible for you to experience the next step. We’ve included additional advice on how to write this paper in How To: Write an Academic Paper.

Because most conferences have maximum length requirements, so to does this: your paper must be a maximum of 12 pages in JDF. Note that references and appendices do not count against this length, and that while this is a maximum, we expect any good paper to also be at least 10 pages.

In writing your paper, we recommend selecting a conference or journal most relevant to your work and reviewing some of the papers published there in the past as well. This will help you understand the general priorities of that venue. Do they expect rigorous statistical analysis, or are they more design- and idea-oriented? Are they more interested in the design of the user interaction, or in the design of the tool under the hood? Do they prefer qualitative or quantitative methods? You can also use this review process to choose the venue most appropriate for your work.

The primary goal of this assignment is to set you up to take the next step with your project, whether that be submitting it for publication, seeking research funding to continue work, or soliciting investors to turn it into a start-up business. A secondary goal is to give you a more thorough medium to share your work; as with the project presentations, with your permission, we’ll add your paper to the course library for future students to view. We also encourage you to submit your work to SMARTech.

Submission Instructions

Complete your assignment using JDF, then save your submission as a PDF. Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. You should submit a single PDF for this assignment. This PDF will not be ported to Peer Feedback, but will be shared to the course assignment library and optionally (with your consent) with future semesters of the class.

If you are working on your project on a team, only one person needs to submit each assignment. Make sure to coordinate who is submitting each, however.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus. The final paper is not eligible for resubmission.