Project Presentation
The final presentations will take place during the period Mon, May 4th through Wed, May 6th. The deadline to request to schedule your presentation time is Friday May 1st, 11pm EST. You may not cancel or reschedule after you schedule your presentation time so please be sure before you sign up!
First, you need to coordinate among yourselves as a group on your availabilities. Next, you need to coordinate with your advisor to get their availabilities (use your team Slack channel if needed). Finally, once you know for certain what date and time works for everyone, go to this calendly link and request to schedule your final presentation. Only one person signs up on behalf of the entire team! When scheduling, use your team name for the "Name" field and the "Email" of the member who is scheduling the meeting (point of contact in your team!). Keep in mind that ALL members as well as the team advisor must be present for the final presentaion. All presentations will happen virtually over Zoom.
The presentation lasts about 25-30 minutes. You must also leave about 10-15 minutes for Q&A for a total of 30-45 minutes. Manage your time well. Our questions may involve asking you to try certain scenarios or inputs in your application during the live demo as well as asking about details of documentation, design and implementation.
It is REQUIRED to use the deployed app online (as opposed to running it locally) for the final presentation.
Show up -- All members must be present for the presentation. Absent members will automatically lose 50% of their presentation points.
Recommended Structure
We recommend structuring your presentation as follows, though this is not required. However, your presentation must include the following information/sections in some form:
Opening remarks [3-4 minutes]
Remind us what your project is about and what problem it solves.
- We know what you've been working on but a brief overview helps to set the scene.
- You must choose one team member to deliver the opening remarks.
- You may use slides (or other visuals) to supplement the delivery.1
What does your application do? [9-11 minutes]
This is about the functional requirements (User Stories) you've written at the onset of your project. Here is the time to show us what your application does.
- We need a live demo (don't use slides, screenshot, etc.)
- Do not waste time showing us trivial features like how user can signup or login to the application. (Unless that's an essential aspect of the app.)
- Strategize and prioritize: we want to see a demo of core "must-have" features that distinguishes your app from others.
- Show us you've delivered what you've set out to do and pepper it up with features that make us go "Wow!"
- All team members must participate; perhaps plan for each member to demo one User Story.
You should all have the app running and each take turn sharing your screen to show us a (2-3 minutes) demo involving one User Story/functionality.
Show the project works! Be sure your demo is iron-clad, test it in advance in exactly the same environment as the demo.
How does your application do it?! [9-11 minutes]
This is about the technical (behind the scene) stuff: design, architecture, code, backend, frontend, technology, APIs, databases, algorithms, etc.
- You must have a slide show for this section.
- Describe the high-level deployment architecture, in particular any distribution, web interaction, database used, etc.
- Next, present a high-level overview of design, likely via a UML class diagram. Don't show us a huge busy diagram of all classes in your code-base. Instead, make it about most interesting sections of the design. In particular, the parts about the critical, core and unique aspects of your application.
- Describe some of the complex algorithms or technologies, tools, ... you have implemented (no need to show the actual code).
- You should organize the presentation delivery into sections divided up amongst group members.
Closing remarks [3-4 minutes]
We are interested to hear about:
- the limitation of your software (what it does not/cannot/will not do)
- the future of your software (what will happen to it after the course is over?!)
- the take-away from this project (yes! a moment of reflection, as a group)
You must choose one team member to deliver the closing remarks (preferably not the same person who delivered the opening remarks). You may use slides (or other visuals) to supplement the delivery.
Everyone must take a part in the final presentation; that is, all members must actively take a role in presenting and demoing the app. Members who do not participate (or underperform) in the presentation will receive a penalty on their grade.
- If you are using slides, keep them simple. Especially, don't use too much text on the slides. ↩