 | General Requirements/Information:
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Your presentation will be a stand-up PowerPoint lecture/discussion which should last between 45-55 minutes, including your
question and answer time. Although your talk should be assessible to guests (i.e., you want them enough detail and context to appreciate your work), your primary audience is the Cedarville faculty and your customers. |
| You can invite anyone you wish to hear your presentation; however, as a
minimum, you must invite the Computer Science and Computer Engineering
faculty, your primary customer and faculty supervisor (these
may be some of the same persons for some of you). If your family or
significant friend (parents' friend, fiancé, long time schoolmate, etc.) will be
present, please let me know beforehand (what relationships and their names),
so I can properly welcome them. |
| Because we may have guests for these presentations, please make an extra
effort to be in your place on time. In addition, during your
presentation remember that you will be seen as a representative of
Cedarville; therefore, friendliness, a positive and upbeat demeanor, and
professional preparation are suitable. |
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I require that you meet before your presentation with your faculty
project advisor for feedback on your presentation. I strongly recommend you do the same with your customer, if possible. Such meetings will
help avoid misunderstandings and surprises during the presentation.
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The presentation and implementation counts for 50% of your overall semester grade (500
points). These points will be allocated as follows:
 | Presentation: 100 points (group assigned) |
| Evaluation of Project: 400 points (group and individually
assigned)
| Group evaluation will be based upon how well you met your original
requirements, apparent robustness of the software, applicability to the
customer, ease of use, difficulty of the tasks, and innovation or
creativity of solution. |
| Individual evaluation will be based upon your team's evaluation of
your contributions to the project. |
| These points will not be awarded until your project
directory and CD with all required materials is submitted to me
(see final project
submission). |
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| As always, you may have one speaker for your presentation or many, your choice.
However, during your
demonstration I recommend that you assign one person to execute the demo and
another to narrate. The following additional requirements apply to the
demonstration:
| The demonstration must show the full capability of your application.
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The demonstration must show a typical use of the application. To
this end, your demo data should represent typical situations and make it
possible to exercise common choices. For example: create typical student education plans and audit them, or create maintenance repair orders and service them.
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| Your demonstration's narration must make it clear to the audience what your doing
(and why) at all times. Please note: I have found in
the past that achieving this objective is difficult, because of your
familiarity with your application. Please be sure to keep in
mind that some of the audience may be seeing this application for
the first time. Remember also, that all of us not on the
project team are seeing the complete application for the
first time. |
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| Presentation Outline:
| Introduce your project and team (1 minute)
| Please be prepared to introduce your team for the benefit of any
guests. |
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| Project Requirements (2-3 minutes)
| Identify and explain the major goals of your project (these goals
should be those that you finally settled upon and accomplished, which are
not necessarily the same as your original goals). Be sure to address
not only what the goals were, but why they were important (to either you
or the customer) |
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Project Design and Implementation (15-20 minutes)
| This is the technical part of your presentation of which I have
significant interest, so do not skip on your descriptions of your:
| Software architecture
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Show and explain the overall architecture of your system
or application. If there is more than one
component (e.g., for the On-Track
team's
application),
explain the components' interrelationships. Note: it is not sufficient to just toss up a diagram and expect us to understand the architecture. Spend the time to think clearly how you can communicate in diagrams the "big picture" of your application, and then think some more, and practice, on how to explain those diagrams to an audience unfamiliar with the application. |
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| Alternatives you considered
| Obviously you don't have time to re-hash every design
choice you made, but what were the major choices that formed
your overall solution? Where there any choices that
you would make differently now having more experience? |
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| Technical hurdles you overcame
| What problems that you solved were the hardest, or that
your the most pleased with? What made the problem
hard? Don't discount that some tasks which are easy
are made difficult due to the lack of information, so if
there are keys to success in your application area, then
share them. |
| Address what you achieved, and even more importantly how
you did it. Help the audience to appreciate the level
of difficulty of your problem, not just by saying "this was
hard", but by giving them insight into the problems you had
to solve along the way and showing how you solved them. |
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Note: Of the "technical" part of your presentation, this matter of helping us understand the nature (pertinance of issue, difficulty of task, suitability of solution) of the problems you solved is the most important. When we understand this area, we are then able to appreciate and value what you have done. Pragmatically speaking, as you would expect, valuing your work has final grade implications. |
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Application Demonstration (12-15 minutes) Reminder: Once you've developed your demonstrations, please re-read the notes on the demonstration above to ensure you are meeting the requirements.
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| Recommendations for Future Work (3-5 minutes)
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Now that your work is done, you've either not accomplished all of your original goals, or (we hope) that
you had new ideas along the way which would make the application even better. Please give your team's consensus opinion on
possible enhancements, extensions, or new uses.
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Note: Be sure to give a priority ordering to your future work ideas (e.g., you may categorize the different ideas as "strongly recommended", "important", "useful enhancement" or some such classification) and estimate
the magnitude of each task.
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| Questions (5-8 minutes) |
| Project Summary (2-3 minutes)
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Lessons learned: what primary lessons will you take away from
this experience (e.g., what interpersonal lessons did you learn from a year-long team
project, project management lessons, task estimation, task decomposition and
design, customer coordination, working with your faculty advisor, growth
in technical maturity or independence, insight into personal strengths or
weaknesses, etc.)
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Note: The lessons learned can address most any idea; however, please
remember to keep them professional and positive. If you've had a
bad experience, please let your faculty advisor or I know privately.
Perhaps it will help us improve the course. |
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| Any additional summary comments you feel appropriate (e.g., thank
guests for attending, thank family for support, etc.) |
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