Literature reviews in student project reports

Writing project reports is an important part of the engineering curriculum at Singapore universities. One important section of the formal report is the literature review. Most universities around the world provide guidelines on writing reviews, emphasizing that plagiarism is unethical. However, these guidelines do not offer explicit training on how to avoid plagiarism. In order to write academically acceptable reviews while avoiding copying from source materials, students face a major challenge and resort to employing various strategies to cope with the task. In this study, we examined the literature review sections of final year project reports to find out how engineering undergraduates in a Singapore university cope with writing reviews and to suggest ways in which they can extend their skills to improve their literature reviews.     

Flying solo and solar to Mars

This paper describes the work done by the Autonomous Systems Lab of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) on the global design of an unmanned solar airplane that can fly continuously over days and night. Part of the Sky-Sailor Project, a first prototype was designed and demonstrated to have very good flight characteristics. The prototype achieved an autonomous flight of five hours with its energy only from the sun. A lightweight control and navigation system was also designed for the aircraft.