A web writeup servs multiple purposes, but the primary purpose is to
show what you have done and present it in a way that makes it easy to
understand. If you follow the guidelines below, it will help to
organize the writeup and make it easy for people to follow along.
For assistance/tutorials on creating a web page, see the
ITS training documents
A basic web writeup for an extended assignment should have the
following parts.
-
Abstract: no more than 200 words describing the project, what you
did, and the main results. It can be a challenge to fit it all
within 200 words, but it is good exercise for writing real abstracts
and summarizing your work succintly.
-
Problem Description: Give a more complete description of the
assignment, in your own words. Explain it so that if your fellow
students were to read the page, they would understand the basic
task. It does not have to be long. If you extended the assignment in
any way, make sure you include that here.
-
Theory and Algorithms: Give a basic description of the theory or
algorithms you used to solve the task. This is where you need to
describe how you solved the problem, as most assignments will
involve writing algorithms to do so. Diagrams, pseudo-code, and
pictures can be very useful in this section. Showing intermediate
results can help people (and the instructor) understand what you
did.
-
Results: Show the results of your algorithms. Give before and after
examples, if appropriate. Tables, pictures or screen dumps are
useful to show results. As part of the section, make sure you
describe the mean of each picture, table, or screen dump so that
readers don't have to figure it out themselves. If you spent some
time testing whether your results were correct, indicate that in
this section. Make sure to include results from any extensions to
the assignment that you completed.
-
Discussion and Summary: If your results show anything interesting,
mention it. If something didn't work the way you expected, explain
why. If something surprised you, discuss how and why it did so. End
with a simple statement about how well you met the task goals.
