CSE 4317 - Final Presentations
Your final presentations should be about 20-30 minutes long. It is essential that you rehearse and time your presentations in advance. The presentation should be treated as a serious professional event.
Part of your presentation should be targeting the general public, that is, people with no computer science background. Such people should still be able to understand what your product does and why it is useful. Oftentimes the most challenging part of designing a successful presentation is to make sure it is understandable by people from different backgrounds.
Part of your presentation will have to be more technical, and it is okay if this part is not as comprehensible by people without a computer science degree. Still, it is recommended that as much as possible you try to make your presentation understandable by as large a section of the audience as possible.
Under no circumstances should you have anything in your presentation that requires more than a degree in computer science to understand. Senior design teams often find this difficult to achieve. After you have been working on your project for two semesters, it may be hard to remember what you knew and did not know about the project topic before you started working on it. So, any technical terms that the average CS graduate of the last 20 years may not be familiar with have to be carefully defined and explained.
Use images and video to help you explain concepts. Presentations will be graded based on quality of the content, and comprehensibility of the content. I can imagine a presentation receiving a perfect grade with few or no images and graphics, if it still has good content and is easy to follow by the audience. I can also imagine a presentation receiving a poor grade with lots of images, video, and graphics, if key concepts remain poorly explained, and/or if the multimedia content does not seem to serve a useful purpose.
In terms of content, your presentation should include:
- A description of your product. What you have tried to do, and what you have actually done. Also, why it is useful, what possible market applications and value it can have. In this part, you may want to refer back to your SRS document, to see what you aimed to accomplish. Still, this description should be high-level, so SRS details like "we will make sure no cables stick out" do not belong to the presentation.
- A description of the major factors that made this project challenging. In short, what took you two semesters to do? What were challenges that you did not anticipate when planning? What were some impressive accomplishments that you achieved when facing those challenges. Have in mind that looking at the demo may not necessarily convey the challenges that you have faced. If it took you forever to rightly configure a mechanical part or to set up a specific software/hardware platform, people will not necessarily be aware of it. This is your chance to highlight what you have accomplished.
- A description of lessons learned (if any) and useful skills or experiences acquired (if any), both regarding the actual project, and regarding the process of working as a team. Do not make this cheesy. If you do not feel you have something genuine to report, do not report anything, I would not frown upon that.
- A description of possible extensions/improvements of your technology, or possible ways to make the product more marketable.
Feel free to follow to structure your presentation in whatever order you like. Overall, as you design your presentation, put yourself as much as possible in the position of the audience and ask yourself:
- Will the audience understand this?
- Will the audience care about this?
In a good presentation, the answer would be yes to both those questions for hopefully most or all parts of the presentation.