CS 497 - Senior Design Project II

Final Presentation Guidelines

The final presentation is a public communication that allows a general audience to find out about your work. It should generally follow the flow of your final report and include a demonstration where appropriate. The final presentation should be about 20 minutes in length. Because it is short, the presentation should concentrate on ``selling'' your project; only the high-level concepts are needed.

Presentations should be made using appropriate presentation technology which may include, but is not limited to (in no particular order of preference): PowerPoint slides, HTML pages, overhead slides, photographic slides, and whiteboard or blackboard diagrams.

Below are short descriptions of the components of a presentation in terms of ``slides,'' but you are not required to use slides in your presentation. A general guideline is fewer than 1 slide per minute of presentation, so most presentations should have around 10 slides and no more than 20 slides.

Title Slide

All presentations should start with a title slide. The title slide should indicate the name of the project, the project engineer(s), the sponsor, the project advisor, the University, and the date.

Introduction (or Summary)

Present a quick rundown of the entire talk on one slide. It should give the audience a good, overall ``big picture'' of the topics you will be covering.

Statement of Problem (or Background)

Give some of the details of the motivation behind the work on one or more slides. It should answer one of two questions, ``why should we care about this work?'' or ``how is this different than other similar work?''

Design Approach

Give an overview of the approach used to solve the problem in one or more slides. Interesting highlights can be given in more detail, but remember that some of the audience will not be experts in the area of your project. Avoid code samples. Diagrams are often helpful, especially if your project has multiple parts.

Results

If you are giving a demonstration, you probably only need one slide describing the result of your work. If you aren't, you may want to include slides showing the examples of the results.

Conclusion(s)

Conclude with two slides: one that reiterates the significance of your project, and one that describes what you learned in this project.

Demonstration

Demonstrate your project where appropriate. This may either be a separate section of your presentation, or integrated within your presentation. In either case, have it scripted and rehearsed, so that you remember to show all of the interesting components of your project.