Where can you get project ideas?

You may get suggestions from teachers, advisors or mentors. Be sure to use the web (www.science-fair.org, www.sciencebuddies.org, www.sciserv.org, www.madsci.org) for inspiration, however your idea should be original. Quality entries from previous fairs are good sources of ideas and best practices. Some high school technology curricula address the engineering design process (www.engineering-ed.org, www.gears-id.org) and many college and professional engineering societies have on-line resources.

You will use the engineering design process to create your fair entry. This process is typical of those used by practicing engineers; the definition of terms and the number of steps may vary, but these are “essential steps.” Your very first step is to start a project notebook in which you will record every step of your process and the results of your design efforts. The process is iterative, meaning the designer will often repeat steps until he or she is confident the design will meet the needs. Note: the terms product, invention, project, design, and solution are often used interchangeably in Fair Guidelines.

The Engineering Design Process:

1. Define a need; express as a goal
2. Establish design criteria and constraints
3. Evaluate alternative designs
4. Build a prototype of best design
5. Test and evaluate the prototype using the design criteria
6. Analyze test results, make design changes, and retest
7. Communicate the design

What is a IEEE Project?

We all know what IEEE stands for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – as of today IEEE is the foremost technical organization related to electronics, electrical, computer science and all related domains and fields.

Well any project that derives its core idea from an IEEE paper is generally regarded as a IEEE project. Having said that one must remember that IEEE papers are very often published after years of research and hence it is practically impossible for BE students or even ME students to exactly follow the work done in a IEEE paper for a final year project. In cases like these where the scope of the IEEE paper is beyond the purview of a BE project or a ME project, the student can take up a part of the paper and implement the same. Alternatively sometimes the scope of a single paper might be too small for a worthy final year project, in which case more than one IEEE papers can be taken as base papers.

One more thing that students are generally confused about is the difference between a IEEE base paper and an IEEE reference paper ! Both the terms are self explanatory because an IEEE base paper is a paper on which the fundamental idea of the project is based on. Whereas an reference paper is a additional paper that deals with some smaller aspect of the project. So typically a project has one base paper and possibly many reference papers. Depending on the nature of the IEEE project, reference papers might be applicable or might not be applicable.