Seminar Presentation Notes

Overview:  In a few short months you will complete your senior design experience with a final presentation on your senior project.  That final presentation is a summary of your work to interested individuals (faculty, peers, customers, friends, parents) and generally restricted to one hour in length.  Due to the more general audience and the time restrictions, the final presentation is not well-suited for a deep technical explanation of the more difficult aspects of your project or a discussion of some technology which you picked up on your own and would like to share with your peers. Therefore, the purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to share with faculty and students some technical aspect of your senior design work which you needed to independently learn, solve or apply.  

The goal of your presentation is to teach your colleagues some interesting, technical aspect of your work that is not generally addressed in the Cedarville curriculum.

General Outline:


bullet Presentation should last between 35-40 minutes.  Please prepare and organize yourselves to meet your time requirements. 
bullet A PowerPoint presentation to accompany your discussion is expected.  This is a technical, teaching presentation.  That is, the primary purpose is to teach, not just demonstrate or discuss what you have done (we'll see that in your final presentation at the end of the semester).  Therefore, give extra care to the questions, "what does our audience need to know to do what we have done, and how can we help them acquire that knowledge." 
bullet You may have one speaker or many, your choice.  During your presentation, I recommend you assign one person to advance the PowerPoint slides as another speaks.  If you have a demonstration, it is usually best if one presenter conducts the demo while another narrates.
bullet I've included a general outline below for consistancy among the presentations.  Although you can move the material around to suit your presentation, please do so sparingly as similar organization will help in communicating your ideas.  In general, you should cover the bulk of the ideas below.  
bullet Introduce your project and team (15-30 seconds)
bullet Introduce the new skill you learned, the problem you solved, or the new tool or software you applied  (3-5 minutes)
bullet Discuss what others need to know to do what you have done --- this section should be the bulk of your presentation  (30 minutes)
bullet Demonstration (if applicable, 5-10 minutes, or it may be worked into the section above) 
bullet Summary (1-2 minutes) - Close out your presentation with summary comments directing listeners to resources which will allow them to expand their understanding of what you've presented by independent study.
 
bullet For the audience, when you are not presenting, please be listening and thinking of questions to ask the speaker or speakers.