Talks for Thurs/Fri

Thursday and Friday of this week, I would like each group to give a short oral presentation on their progress with the rocket project so far. A few formal details:

• It is a group presentation - designate a speaker, or take turns. Either way.
• Minimum 10 minutes, maximum 15 minutes per group
• Powerpoint/etc are not required but may be used if you like.
• We will start on Thurs and finish these on Fri. Pseudo-random numbers will choose your presentation order on Thurs.
  

As for the content, I would mainly like to see you present your basic approach to the assignment, where you are now, and what you think you still need to do.

• What is required for the project?
• What experimental quantities must be determined, and what is your progress?
• What parameters must be controlled, and what is your approach?
• What are the relative errors & their sources?
• How will you determine the trajectory/angle at launch time?
• What problems are still outstanding?
• What solutions are you still working on?

I'll discuss this a bit more tomorrow, but hopefully you get the idea. This is really just meant to be a reasonably informal (but not too informal) status report, like an oral version of your memos, updated with all your recent progress.

You can keep the talk fairly general in some respects - I am not asking you to give all your secrets away to the other teams, but I do expect you to give concrete statements about what you have done. For example - quoting your launch velocity and error or discussing the algorithm you are using for your calculations is fairly general. Giving away your trick for highly accurate positioning of the turret or optimizations to basic algorithms is not necessary.

Grade-wise, this will count as a lab.