BIOE80 Final Project Instructions

FINAL PROJECT INTRODUCTION

Your Wish, Your Plan, Your Play

Your final project has three major parts: (1) your wish, (2) your plan, and (3) your play.

Class projects must be submitted electronically via a link that will be shared later! We will host your projects on the class website.

LEARNING GOALS & MOTIVATION

Our goal with the group project is to empower you to think about and plan for the future you wish to realize or contribute to via bioengineering. We aim to enable you to devise and express your team’s wish that can be made true by of before the year 2030. We will help you develop a descriptive but practical plan for realizing your wish. Finally, we will ask you to represent your wishes and plans as a story, specifically as a three-act play that you make and record via Zoom with your team.

Independent of your academic level, whether a first-year or a graduating senior, we hope that the class project will enable you to take steps towards organizing your plans. As a first-year, the project may help you decide what other courses to take in the future (i.e., serve as a cornerstone to your curriculum). As a graduating senior, the project may help you reflect on what you have learned and use them in realizing your next steps, and may even serve as the first-draft of a specific plan for what you do next.

PROJECT COMPONENTS & POINT ALLOCATIONS

You and your team will have to complete the following deliverables as part of the project. Some of the deliverables are due along the way (i.e., not everything is turned in at the end of quarter).

Team rules (6 pts, Due: Fri 15 May)

Brainstorm and ideation (5 pts, Due: Fri 15 May)

Priority setting and project selection (10 pts, Due: Fri 22 May)

Written project description (24 pts, 3 points per, Due: Monday June 1st)

(Notes: Please turn in a single document per group, via Gradescope. Include your group number. Bullet point answers are fine. Make sure to include references.)

Answer the following eight questions (adapted from DARPA’s Heilmeier Catechism):

  • What are you trying to do? Succinctly articulate your wish using absolutely no jargon.

  • What’s happening today, what is the problem, or what are the limits of current practice?

  • What is new in your approach and why do you think you will be successful?

  • Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will your success make?

  • What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success?

  • What is the greatest obstacle to your success?

  • What could go horribly wrong? What are the risks?

  • How much will it cost? How long will it take?

High-level storyboard (15 pts, Due: Fri 5 June)

  • Act 1 – Your wish has come true (key dialog, scene detailsm and mood setting re: your wish being true (i.e., living in the future))

  • Act 2 – Despair, challenge, disaster (ditto but re: the most dramatic challenge encountered in making wish true)

  • Act 3 – Path to victory (ditto but re: the most important success realized along the path to success)

Final recording of play’s performance (35 pts, Due: Thu 11 June)

Internal team member reviews (5 pts, Due: Thu 11 June)

There will be additional information and deadlines for each deliverable. Briefly, your team’s final recording should be a 9-12 min zoom recording of your play, each Act being 3-4 min long.

Please turn in your final project not later than 5p on Thursday 11 June.

You will NOT need to do a formal presentation or report in class.

Please ask us if you have any questions.

github source code for teaching staff

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