Presentation Format

Giving the remote learning situation, we want to continue to provide flexibility in this final presentation. You are allowed to submit a recorded presentation or schedule a time to stream your presentation. We will invite your community partner and CLS staff to attend these if they are able, as we do for in-person final presentations. For either option, you should take your presentation seriously and think of it as a final public presentation with the professionalism and polish that goes along with that.

I will also share the recordings or times of presentations through PWeb so that you can see what other groups accomplished this semester if you are interested, but it is not required.

Presentation Content

Above all keep in mind that these are non-technical presentations and therefore should not go into the technical detail that you have in your demos and should avoid all jargon. 

Your team has a great deal of flexibility in how you want to present the current state of the software that you have been developing this term. We offer these ideas as suggestions for what to consider including in your presentation.

These presentations should take about 20 to 25 minutes each – MAXIMUM. 

Your audience will include your classmates and instructor, Susan Sanning from CLS, and the community partners for your team (some may not be able to attend, but they are invited).

You should prepare a Powerpoint (or similar) slideshow with screen captures of the most important parts of your program, if you are presenting live.  Computer programs frustratingly often do not work properly when you are in front of an audience! This should be more of a poster session than an actual walkthrough demo.  You certainly may try to show the working application, but I highly recommend having screenshots in a presentation format as a backup.

• Since some of the people who may be attending do not know anything about your project, you should briefly describe what the purpose of the software is: what is its major function and how does it help your community partner fulfill their mission?
• It is helpful for everyone to have a brief narrative of what features or changes or improvements were requested by the community partner. You might go back to your initial notes from the first meeting with your community partner and review the user stories or feature list. In some cases, you might need to explain that many important improvements are not visible but essential to the security of the program’s operation. Most of our partners will understand and appreciate the care we are taking to protect their users and their data.
• This should be a non-technical presentation aimed at your community partner and CLS staff. Therefore, there should be no jargon unless you clearly explain its meaning and it is absolutely necessary.
• Talk about – and possibly have slides showing images of – the current state of deployment of your project. If it is in progress, just let us know that there are still issues to work out next term. If you are (almost) done – mention that too.
• Aim to show us how major features or the new improvements function, but you do not have to demonstrate everything that the program does.