Presentations

Senior design enables you to focus on your own project, and push your technical capabilities through it. However, it is very important to learn how to successfully communicate what you’re doing, and why it is cool with the outside world. Thus, a significant component of this class is learning and practicing the non-technical skills of writing and presentation.
It isn’t enough to technically complete your project. You also need to sell it! Presentation skills are very important and relatively rare in graduating undergrads. Thus much of SD will focus on your presentation skills.
Since all projects this year are team projects, the presentations will be team presentations but we will be assessing each team member’s presentation skills.

Presentation 1 - Elevator Pitch

This presentation will focus on the elevator pitch for your project. Imagine you have a few minutes with someone, and your goals are to have them understand what the project is, why it is important, that it is possible, and your general approach. The intended audience can be investors (VCs) and/or upper management in your organization (not your immediate program/project manager or faculty supervisor).
You should prepare a (max) six minute “business proposal”. Your goal is to convince us that what you are building is a great idea and that you have some structure in mind to make it a reality.
The presentations should build off the project summary document that you submitted: what are you building and why? Motivation (why build it)? Goals? Users ? Why/how is it different from current products/products/research? Check the rubric outlining expectationd and assessment.

Presentation 2 - Technical Design

The goal of this presentation is to present the technical design of your project to a technically savvy audience such as your project manager/your technical team/research funding agency/faculty supervisor etc. The presentation should assume that they have heard the “elevator pitch” in detail, so your primary goal now is to convince them of the technical innovation and challenges in your project. The technical managers (research funding agency, etc.) need to be convinced not only that the project is viable and innovative but also that it justifies the size of the team (this translates to cost of the project).
You should prepare a (max) 7 minute presentation to describe the overall architecture of your project and convey the technical challenges and innovations, and conclude with your plans for the alpha release. A sample structure of your presentation could be:

Start with a brief overview of the system goals (keep this to one minute)
Provide the system architecture diagram
then give a technical description of what the key components are, and who is developing each component (this could be conveyed by having that team member present the particular component)
Technical innovation: what exactly is technically novel about the project ?
Design feasibility: what (types of) technologies/libraries you will make use of, how the pieces will interact, and why do you think the design will work?
alpha prototype (plan for 1 minute max on this)
Technical challenges and risks: what are the “unknowns” (what have you not figured out, where is the risk)? what is the development cost (lines of code, people, HW etc.)? if you have identified potential roadblocks/points of failure then point these out.
Put particular effort into having a nice visual that helps us understand the components of your system. (In the brief overview of the system, please briefly remind everyone of the motivation and context for your project.) We will use a rubric similar to the first presentation but with more emphasis on the technical description (including the scope and the technical depth of your project).

Presentation 3

The end of Fall semester requires a final Fall presentation (presentation 3) and a demo of the Alpha prototype.
(This is similar to the first technical presentation, i.e., the second presentation you gave. Your first technical presentation can serve as the first draft for this presentation.)
Introduce your project and state what problem you are solving (stick to one or two slides, and provide the motivation). Describe the overall architecture of your project – start with brief overview of the system, technical components, what types of technologies/libraries you used and how the pieces interact. We recommend using screenshots or videos of your alpha demo where possible. One extreme case is to talk through the technical design while showing a video of the demo. Time: 7-8 minutes. The rubric is similar to Presentation 2 - equal parts weighted on speaking skills and the content including technical complexity.

Alpha Prototype Demo

The demo is a sit down to talk through the code and the system features. You should plan your demo (i.e., how you will walk us through it) so you convey the features and some use cases, and be ready to discuss key technical aspects.

Beta Prototype Demo

This demo is a sit down demo to assess progress since the Alpha demo. The demo will be assessed based on the progress since the alpha demo, how you have addressed the feedback (questions and suggestions) fron the alpha demo, and clear specification of the steps needed to provide an end to end working system (with all components integrated).

Presentation 4: Final Promotional presentation

This is the final promotional presentation of your project (your Presentation 1, elevator pitch, could be viewed as a first draft of a promotional presentation). This presentation should be planned as a 2-3 minute presentation, and the content can be used towards the final promotional project video you will upload as part of your final package. The presentation should tell the audience what your project does - what problem does it solve, why is it important, and possibly user stories on how the project can be used. The presentation should not get into details on how the project was implemented and how it works (a short slide on this is okay, but the details of “how” should be left to the final presentation). The rubric is similar to Presentation 1 rubric - with equal parts weighted on presentation skill and content (slides, project description of what it does,etc.)

Demo 3: Preliminary Prototype

This is a demo of an “almost completed” project. We will assess whether you have a end to end working system, with all components integrated, and if all project features (as discussed during Alpha and Beta demos) are implemented. The projects should have a near final user interface. After this demo, the goal should be to carry out more testing, debugging and cleaning up the UI based on the feedback you will receive. Grading will take into account the technical complexity of the project.

Mock 100% Demo

The mock demo will be more like a presentation to the instruction team; it will serve as the blueprint for your final presentation and demo, and your final project features. You should walk the audience through what you will demo - how the project looks to the user, how user interacts with it, features you will implement and demonstrate, and what architectural details you will demonstrate or discuss.

Final Presentations

This is the final project presentation - and will be similar to Presentation 3 (the end of Fall semester presentation). Introduce your project and state what problem you are solving and what your project does (stick to a few slides and max of 2 minutes to convey this). Next discuss how the project works: Describe the overall architecture of your project – start with brief overview of the system, technical components, what types of technologies/libraries/APIs you used and how the pieces interact. We recommend using screenshots or videos of your alpha demo where possible. One extreme case is to talk through the technical design while showing a video of the demo. Total Time: 8 minutes. The rubric is similar to Presentation 3 - equal parts weighted on speaking skills and the content. We will have guests attending, and some quests will be evaluating the presentations.

Final Demo

This demo must show your final end to end working system. It will be a sit down demo with the instruction team, and you can use your Mock Demo blueprint to walk the audience through the demo and showcase the project features. Expect to show the code working. Rubric is similar to Alpha Demo but will be weighted on how complete the system is, final features implemented, presence (or absence) of bugs in your system and technical complexity.