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The Ultimate "OMG Help me with my EE" Thread

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Reply 40
well aim for C when doin a phy EE.... coz thats the max u can get. Einstein will probably get a C too if his EE was a phy one.
a C? I highly doubt that, I got an A
Reply 42
my EE was on Physics.
Ill be happily surprised if i get a C :p: it was that ****e.
ashwin2290
my EE was on Physics.
Ill be happily surprised if i get a C :p: it was that ****e.


What did you do your EE on? I did mine on aerodynamics and lift etc.
I've been emailing someone about the psychology EE, so I thought I'd post my advice here, too...

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(IBer writes and ask for help on picking an essay topic, possibly about adolecents or first impressions)
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PICKING A TOPIC
I think what makes a really good psychology essay is something you can debate, that a lot of studies have been done on. Bilingualism is a common topic for extended essay I think because it has a lot of interest among IB students (many are bilingual), a lot of work has been done on bilingual language development, and there's a lot of debate as to whether being raised bilingually is helpful or not (but the general agreement today is that it's a good thing, but it was very controversial 20-30 years ago). It's not a bad topic to pick if it appeals to you.

My topic was titled something like "simultaneous balanced bilingualism: does being raised with two languages help or hinder language development?"

The key is to pick a topic that is very specific (otherwise you can't adress the question well), with two arguments (so you can debate), and something not too obscure (so you can find information on it). If you think a topic might be good, type it into scholar.google.com and see what comes up.. if you're already getting some useful information it could be a good topic (as long as it's specific enough!).

On the other hand, you could pick something to do with adolesence or social psychology, as long as your topic is specific and has two opposing views. I'm weary of topics like "adolence" because they're not specific enough and "first impressions" because that's not really a topic much credible research has been done on. If you're interested in abnormal psychology for example, you could write about the high incidence of diagnostic rates for depression among adolecents and whether the high diagnostic rate means either psychologists are overdiagnosing teenage angst as depression or it could mean that adolencents are getting the help that they need.

Is this helping? If you want more ideas, let me know! I'm not an expert, but that's the sense I get from writing my own extended essay and seeing my classmates write theirs...

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(IBer writes back and says they want to write about problems with children computer game addiction)
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PICKING A TITLE:

That sounds interesting, a good controversial topic with plenty of research and attention. I like it. Don't panic! I'm sure if you pick any reasonable topic your supervisor will approve, you can start doing research, it will help specifiy your topic. So read more about gaming and children and see what specifically your title should be.

For example, do you know what problems about game addiction you'd like to talk about? What type of games? Read a couple reviews and find out what people these days think that gaming might do, and what research has been done on. Does it cause attention disorders, aggression, lower grades in school? I would discuss maybe the most significant concern about gaming addiction in children (for example, aggression). From this develop a title: "Does gaming make children agressive? An investigation on the possible short and long term effects of violent video games." Something like that...

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RESEARCH
Do plenty of research. I'd aim for a first draft in late September, as the deadline is around Christmas. But try to get most of your research done now. Read as much as you can about the topic and take notes on anything that might be relevant to your essay. Then think about how to structure it.

Research will take the bulk of the time for your EE, and once you know enough about it, writing will be easy. I would search on the internet (or a library if you have a good one nearby.. possibly a university library). Look for scholarly articles, in real psychology journals by doctors, other stuff (eg news) is unsubstantiated or doesn't tell the whole story and not as useful a source. Reviews are particiularly good to look at because they give you an overview of many studies and can tell you which other papers are important to look at in the studies they talk about. When you find a useful source, see if other more recent work cites it and that way you'll find the latest research in the feild. Scholar.google.com is useful for that. When you search a topic like "game addiction in children" it lists relevant articles and below each article you can click on "cited by [number]" and if you click on that, it will tell you what other more recent papers based their work on that paper. As a general rule, more influential papers are cited more and therefore will have a higher number, but of course really new papers will have few citations anyway because people haven't had time to write about them yet... but they can still be influential.

Take good notes of what you research and keep all your references (I recommend printing them out and writing notes on them, or at least saving a copy of everything you read on your computer). That way when you get to writing, you can easily find where the information came from when you want to reference something- and you don't get that annoying I-know-I-read-it-somewhere feeling. That way everything you write can be easily sustantiated.

Sorry if I'm telling you stuff you already know, but it took me ages to figure out just how to find good material when I started my EE. At university you write stuff like this all the time, so it gets easier to find stuff. Good luck!

Happy to help further if you need me. :smile:
yeah me too, i did mine on measuring the coefficient of drag of spheres and flat plates with different speeds and sizes
Reply 46
arisk01
What did you do your EE on? I did mine on aerodynamics and lift etc.



wups, a little late.
My EE was very very basic ( i got a B for it! :redface:) it was to investigate the effect of resonant frequencies on different type of glass...something along those lines :p:
I want to do my EE in maths, becasue I think it will be really useful when it comes to uni interviews etc. but not really sure which topic to hone in on.
Have considered:

The use of prime numbers in cryptography (although I'm not sure how I would squeeze a lot of material out of this, what kinda things to go into etc.)

Something to do with Fractals (only just discovered what these are, seems really interesting although I need to find out what kinda thing I could write about and more information on them)

Any more topic ideas?
Or reviews/info or my considered topics?

Cheers
Your considered topics are things that are done quite often, so you might want to come up with something else.

One topic I considered doing, though I ended up writing my EE in physics, was about the approximation of pi with fractions.
Rainfaery
Your considered topics are things that are done quite often, so you might want to come up with something else.

One topic I considered doing, though I ended up writing my EE in physics, was about the approximation of pi with fractions.


Would that involve an infinite arithmetic progression of fractions that got as close to pi as possible?
How would you decide on the fractions?
and what else could you write about?
IBiot Ash '08
Would that involve an infinite arithmetic progression of fractions that got as close to pi as possible?
How would you decide on the fractions?
and what else could you write about?


Well, I imagine in your introduction you could write about pi being irrational, and different attempts in the past to approximate it as a fraction. Then you could come up with your own method to do it.

Here's a link to the wikipedia article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_approximations_of_%CF%80
Rainfaery
Well, I imagine in your introduction you could write about pi being irrational, and different attempts in the past to approximate it as a fraction. Then you could come up with your own method to do it.

Here's a link to the wikipedia article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_approximations_of_%CF%80


Thanks a lot, seems like quite the 'holy grail of mathematics'
and there is a lot of good material on that site alone
IBiot Ash '08
Thanks a lot, seems like quite the 'holy grail of mathematics'
and there is a lot of good material on that site alone


Sure, no problem. :smile: I still kind of wish I'd done that as my EE, but it's a bit late now. :p:
Reply 53
You can do the Riemann Hypothesis, which basically guesses how many prime numbers are in a certain range. It's a pretty trippy thing, and you'll find lots of material on it.
As mentioned before, pi is great.
Fractals, you can do in relation to modern art. You can find some pretty awesome ones on Deviantart:
http://www.deviantart.com/#order=9&q=fractals
You can do some sort of applied maths; I'm doing mine on the geometry as explained in the Einstein Field Equations
If you're in Stats, then you can do some sort of experiment and do some sort of statistics on it.
Cryptography is a great topic in general, you can talk about some of the algorithms used to solve them
Probability in card games (one of the ones I wished I had done).
Are these good titles? I'm doing it in psychology and I was wondering which of these would be best to use...Thanks for the help.


'How can attitudes towards same-sex parents affect their childrens development?'

'to what extent does our culture compared to others affect the rate at which people develop depression?'

'To what extent can anxiety affect a persons memory?'

'How can our stress levels affect our attitude towards those around us?'

'How can being surrounded by stress affect the way in which childrens self-concept develops?'
anyone?
Reply 56
ib love "to what extent..." questions so i would go with one of those
Fair topics, but I see that you could very easily be making these VERY broad questions or VERY limited questions.

Just stay focused, and your fine :smile:
thanxs for the advice...lol I could make all of those 'to what extent questions'


Which do you think is the most interesting then?
Reply 59
the culture one isgood because it takes into account an international quality. however i would make sure you clearly define what you mean by "our culture" and "other cultures" do you mean british vs others, western vs eastern, western europe vs eastern europe etc.

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