Presentation Guidelines
The following are some brief guidelines to help you organize your presentations for the capstone course.
Presentations
The class presentations should be comprehensive presentations that explain what has been done in the recently completed phase of the project and how it fits with the project as a whole. Your presentation is a chance to describe what issues have come up and get feedback from your peers. Some of your time should be reserved for questions and feedback. As your project develops, you should think about the type of questions people might ask you. As well, you should think about questions you might ask of other groups and their projects.
Evaluation criteria
The evaluation criteria are mostly qualitative and are not set in stone. As a general philosophy, you are evaluated on what you do well. It is hoped that you will use the presentations as a way to begin working toward your poster and final report.
There are a small number of absolute requirements for presentations:
- You must have a visual aid. The visual aid could be a chart, an artifact that you collected, a screen shot, a demo, power-point slides or anything else that you might use to help make the presentation concrete.
- All members of the project group must participate in presenting.
- At a minimum of two times during the presentation you are expected to pause and raise a question that would require feedback or input from the members of the class.
Some questions that might help guide you in developing a presentation:
- Does the presentation tell a coherent story? It’s not essential that the presentation have all the answers or everything complete, but the story should flow.
- Do the findings/results/conclusions follow (some how) from the content of the presentation?
- What did you do during this phase? What method(s) were used?
- Is there a clear rationale for the decisions? You might be forced to make (what would seem) an arbitrary decision (say about a design, an implementation issue or almost anything). Did you ‘flip a coin’ or is there any reason behind the decision?
- Is there any self-reflection on the project? Did the project members think critically of the directions/decisions?
- Is there acknowledgement of what worked (what is going well) and/or what did not work (what is not going so well)?
- How does the visual aid assist in the explanation? Your visual aid should assist you in telling your story.
- How much emphasis was placed on this phase of the project? Does the depth of the content/result demonstrate an equivalent amount of insight/effort?
- Does the results of this phase relate to the results in the other phases of the project? Do the phases some how flow or relate to each other?