Presentation Format

Your team will do a presentation similar to the sprint demos we have been doing at the end of each sprint, although given that you will need some time to give a high level overview of your program’s purpose and the community partner’s specifications and user stories, you will have 25 minutes for the presentation and a question and answer period.

Don’t be surprised if you have more questions from this audience than from your classmates, and allocate your time accordingly.

Presentation Content

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. We need to leave time for questions and to switch who is sharing their desktop.  

Your audience will include your classmates and instructor, Susan Sanning from CLS, the community partners and alumni mentors for all of the teams (some may not be able to attend, but they are invited), and possibly other members of the Grinnell College campus community.  

• These presentations often work best if you prepare a Power Point (or similar) slideshow with screen captures of the most important parts of your program.  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 many of the people who may be attending do not know anything about your project, it will be helpful to 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 users will understand and appreciate the care we are taking to protect their users and their data.
• Since a good portion of the audience will be made up of our community partners, be careful to avoid computer science jargon. Some cannot be avoided, but try to explain your progress in general terms (good practice for both industry and research!!).
• 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.