Project, part 1: research a topic and organise your materials

This is where the skills from the whole course come together in one realistic piece of work. You will act as a volunteer who has been asked for a short briefing by a community organisation. Part 1, this lesson, is about the quiet work that makes the final product good: understanding what is asked, finding and checking information, and keeping your materials in order. Part 2 turns the materials into a report, a spreadsheet, a presentation and an email. Everything here uses a made-up organisation and made-up people, but the habits are the ones used in every school and office.

Start with the brief

A brief is a short written request that says what is wanted, for whom, in what form and by when. The most common reason for a poor result is not weak skill but a misunderstood brief. Read the brief twice, underline what is required, and write down questions before you start. Here is the brief for this project. It is fictional.

Turn the brief into a plan in your own words. A simple planning note has five lines: goal (one sentence), audience, deliverables, deadline and questions to answer. Work backwards from the deadline: if you need to send on Friday, aim to finish on Thursday, so that you have time to fix problems.

Goal: help families understand which household habits use the most electricity, and how to reduce them.
Audience: families at the Saturday workshop, no technical knowledge.
Deliverables: 1-page report, spreadsheet (4 appliances), 5 slides, covering email.
Deadline: Friday 14 June, 17:00. My target: Thursday 13 June, 17:00.
Questions:
1. What does a kilowatt-hour mean in plain words?
2. Which common appliances use the most energy, and why?
3. What simple habits reduce use without spending money?
4. How can a family work out what an appliance costs per day?

Build the project folder first

Create the folder structure before you collect a single file, using the system from the file-naming lesson. When files arrive in the right place from the start, you never face a pile of downloads at the end.

Researching one question at a time

Go through your questions one by one instead of browsing at random. For each, choose search words, scan the results, open a few promising pages and compare. Use the search skills you practised earlier: key words rather than sentences, quotation marks for exact phrases, and the address and snippet of each result before clicking.

Checking sources

Not every page deserves your trust. Ask five questions of each source. Who wrote it, and do they know the subject? When was it written, and is it still current? What evidence does it give: figures, named studies, links? Why was it written: to inform, to sell, to persuade or to entertain? Do others agree? Compare with at least one other independent source for any important fact.

Keep a source log

A source log is a simple spreadsheet in which every fact you may use is written down together with where it came from. It costs a minute per fact and saves hours later, when you must cite sources and cannot remember where a number came from.

Use your own words in the log. Copying long passages from a page is a risk in itself, because you may later paste them into your report without noticing. If you do need to quote exactly, put the words in quotation marks in the log and note the page. Remember what the copyright lesson said: you may use ideas and facts with a citation, but you may not present someone else's writing, pictures or tables as your own.

Downloading and organising materials

Sometimes you will save a page, a PDF or a data table. Download only from the official website of the organisation that published it. Expect PDFs and ordinary documents. Be suspicious of a download that is a program, or an archive that you did not expect, or a site that asks you to install something to "view" a document. Check the file type shown at the end of the file name before you open it.

1. Save straight into 02-research/sources, if your browser asks where to save. If it saves to Downloads, move the file at once.
2. Rename the file using the convention: 2025-06-03_energy-agency_reading-your-bill.pdf.
3. Open the file and check that it is the document you expected.
4. Add a row to the source log with the same title, the publisher and today's date.
5. Copy the web address into the log as well. The page may change or disappear later.

By the end of this lesson you should have a project folder, a plan, at least four checked sources for your questions and a source log. These are the raw material for part 2, where you produce the deliverables.