Practical Pilot

Practical Pilot - A-Level Physics practicals, streamlined.

Practical Pilot is a desktop application designed to help A-Level Physics students record results, analyse data, and produce printable pdfs of grapghs + reports of results.

This project was my Coursework for my OCR A-Level in Computer Science. For which both my program and it's corresponding write-up achieved an impressive 100% .

The Project Consists of 5 main screens of core functionality.

A "Welcome Screen" which contained buttons to navigate between core functionality and included a built in Video Tutorial. Which when clicked created a temporary video player in the application using the 'vlc' library in python. Allowing for easy teaching of core program features.

A "Exprement Screen" containing a large table of results for users to input experimental data into. This screen contained many unique features, validation for significant figures of the user's input ensuring quality of scientific data entered as well as significant figure correction for data. Automatic calculation for the means and uncertainties of data results was also added, along with data outlier detection, where users can dynamically set the strength of outlier detection and highlight erroneous data in red.

A "Graph Screen" which allows users to plot their previously collected data onto scatter graphs. Optimal Lines Of Best Fit (LOBF) can be automatically generated for the data, with sliders being added in later iterations to allow users to manually adjust these LOBFs to better suit trends when extreme outliers are present in the data. Much like the "Experiment Screen" outliers of variying strength can be spotted in these graphs. Error bars can also be plotted to graphically display uncertainty in the data.

A "Report Generation Screen" was created to allow users to easily compile all data colleted and analised on my program into custom formatted pdfs which can be later printed off and worked with offline. Users can toggle which features are included in the resulting pdf report and also select from aprox 12 pre-made diagrams of "Required Practicals" present in the A-Level AQA syllabus.

Finally a "History Screen" allowing for users to access previously recorded results. This was achieved through using csv files, with each saved set of results having a title, topic of study, save date and user written description. The famous algorithms Merge Sort and Binary Search were implemented to allow users to change the order of displayed results and search for specific sets of results.

This project was deeply full filling as it allowed me to really show off my creativity and passion for physics (As this project was developed whilst also undertaking A-Level Physics). I even got to personally use the project on several occations after completion within my own practicals and their corresponding write-ups.