GLY6932 Special Topics: GIS Applications in Earth Sciences

Lab Assignment and Report Guidelines

    • All assignments should be in Word or Adobe PDF format (if. If you do not know how to create PDF files, review instructions on creating PDF files.
    • Word and PDF files must be zipped to save disk space. Please use WINZIP (Exercise 1b) to zip files before e-mailing them to me.
    • Assignments will be turned in as zipped attachments to jaeger@geology.ufl.edu or you can use a CD-RW or USB drive.  Please name them using your “name” plus the lab number, so that for John Jaeger  it would be “johnj-lab1.zip” and so on.
  • Why are these assignments required?
    • These assignments are designed to develop your technical knowledge of GIS by using ArcView's functionality. If you have completed the lab exercises and paid attention to what you were doing, you should be able to answer these questions without too much difficulty. Use any materials at your disposal to aid in understanding and answering the questions, including this course's materials, library materials, web resources, professors, etc.
  • Why are lab reports required?
    • The goal of having you turn in lab reports, as opposed to simply answers to lab questions, is to provide you experience in creating clear, concise documents – in short, to create a technical report.  These documents should not be overly long (a maximum a couple of pages, single-spaced).  Please make use of embedding hyperlinks in your documentation, so that a reader can easily access additional reference material that your work is based on.  Click here for more details and a rough example of a report.
  • Who does your work?
    • You are encouraged to discuss amongst each other the assignments as well as methodologies for solving the problems.
    • Feel free to work in groups or alone as you please, in order to come up with a methodology for solving the problems. However, when you turn in an assignment, make sure that you have done the calculations and analysis, that you have written the answers, that you have made the maps, and that the answers are in your own words.
    • Plagiarism is a serious offense at the University of Florida; it will not be tolerated and will be treated as a serious offense that can lead to dire consequences, including expulsion. Any obvious occurrences of cheating will be immediately forwarded to the Dean.
    • If you have any doubts, please see the official word on Academic Honesty.
  • Style, fonts, font size, line spacing
    • Use 1.5 or 2.0 spacing for your assignments.
    • Your work will be graded only on content, but it will also be edited for style, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
    • Always provide units when reporting numerical values or displaying graphs. Missing unit declarations will be downgraded.
    • Use the Windows functionality for screen captures (See below) when asked to include maps in your assignments.
    • Make sure maps are legible, and that they clearly show what you intend to display. Do not assume that the map reader knows what you intend to communicate. Use appropriate colors, symbols, text size, line width, etc.
    • Please use Times (or Times New Roman), 12 point as the font for your assignments. Certain fonts have been known not to come across in the PDF files.
    • Do not use red colored fonts for your answers (since my comments will also be in red). However, use any other color you like.
  • Corrected assignments
    • Your assignments will be returned in digital format.

 

Screen Capture

When asked to provide images or maps in the assignment, use the standard Windows functionality to create screen captures, and then place these inside your document. For those of you who do not know how this is done, here are instructions (which, incidentally, are how all of these course pages were created):

  1. Size the window as you would like it to appear in your word-processing application.
  2. Make sure the window you wish to capture is active.
  3. Press the <Alt-Print Screen> keyboard combination.
  4. Make the word-processed document active.
  5. Press the CTRL-V keyboard combination
  6. If you wish to crop the images before they are placed in the document, do so in an image processing application such as Photoshop, 20/20, or LviewPro, then use the word-processor to insert the image from a file.