Plan

Given the statement of an exercise for a particular Lab you should try to formulate an outline plan as early as possible - and record it in your report. This holds even if you subsequently have to severely modify (or even abandon) your plan.

A plan should be a concise statement of how you intend to approach the exercise. The details will vary, of course, from case to case. But the plan will typically involve breaking the overall exercise into smaller, more managable pieces; experimenting with things you don't yet understand properly; identifying problems you anticipate; and perhaps an outline of how a program will be structured (what is technically called an algorithm).

The lab instructions may well already outline a plan. But even in that case, you should consider whether you could usefully break down some of the steps suggested in the instructions into even smaller pieces.

There will be no unique, "correct" plan. Some questions we will ask in assessing the report are: Did you make a plan at all? Is the plan clear and concise? Is it understandable? Is it practical? Is it "internally" consistent? Does it ultimately correspond with what was asked for in the instructions?

A plan will normally be at most one paragraph.

Subsequently in the report you can then describe progress compared to the plan. In particular, you can describe problems you encounter in following the plan, and any on-going changes you decide to make to it.