Presentation Guidelines

The capstone course requires students (project teams) to make formal and informal presentations. The following are some brief guidelines to help you organize your presentations.

In-Process Presentations

The in-process presentations should be short presentations (10 minutes of presentation, 5 minutes of questions) that explain what has been done in the current phase of the project and how it fits with the project as a whole. The in-process presentation is a chance to describe (in a preliminary way) what issues have come up and get feedback from your peers. You will get the chance to both present and provide feedback. Some of your time is reserved for questions. 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 in-process presentations as a way to begin working toward your final presentation and your final report.

There are a small number of absolute requirements for in-process presentations:

  1. 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.
  2. All members of the project group must participate in presenting.
  3. You cannot go over 10 minutes. You need to time your talk so that you complete the presentation on time. {Aside: I will bring an alarm :-) }

Some questions that might help guide you in developing an in-process 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?

Final Presentations

Final presentations are longer presentations that cover your whole project in some detail. You will be allocated a total of 30 minutes (20 minutes for your presentations and 10 minutes for questions). Final presentations will happen during the last week of the quarter. The final presentations will occur during one or more class sessions so that everyone can have adequate time. The presentations are open to the public and will be publicized to the iSchool community.

Evaluation criteria

Again, the evaluation criteria for final presentations are mostly qualitative. Your final presentation should cover the entire project. You’ll have had practice explaining the first two portions of your project. You should be careful to work on bringing the third part of your project together with the first two. Some questions to help you think about your final presentation:

  • How is this problem an ‘informatics’ problem? What makes this problem interesting from the point of view that combines people, technology & information?
  • How do the parts of the project relate?
  • How do the results of each phase relate to each other in the final project? Which results in particular from each phase was useful to you in upcoming phases?
  • How does this represent an improvement? How do you know you’ve made a difference?