PP01 - Tech Spike Presentation

Each project team will prepare and deliver a presentation that introduces the project on which they are working, outlines the goals of their Tech Spike and demonstrates some of the artifacts that have been built.

Assignment

Presentation Content

The presentation should include the following content:

• Introduce the project on which the team is working and provide some insights into why it was chosen.
• Outline the team’s goals for the Tech Spike and relate them to the projects tech stack.
• Demonstrate several of the artifacts created by the team, ensuring that:
  • Every team member is involved the demonstration of at least one artifact that they built or helped to build.
  • Each demo shows how some technical details of the implementation are connected to the its behavior. You should focus on a small piece of behavior with an interesting implementation and clearly explain how the implementation leads to the behavior.
• Reflect on and summarize your team’s experience with the tech spike including:
  • The degree of success achieved by the Tech Spike.
  • Significant challenges that were faced and how they were resolved.
  • Tech Spike goals that were not achieved.
  • Lessons learned.

Presentation Criteria

The presentation should aim to meet the following criteria:

• Timing: Meet the target length for the presentation within plus or minus 2 minutes. The target time for your presentation will be set as follows:
  • 8 minutes for project introduction and conclusions.
  • 6 minutes for each demonstration, where teams will use the minimum number of demonstrations necessary to ensure that all members are involved in the demonstration of at least one artifact that they built or helped to build.
  • For example: A team of 4 may need two demonstrations, so the target time for their presentation would be 8 + 6*2 or 20 minutes.
  • There will be an additional 5-10 minutes of question and answer time following the presentation.
• Balance: All team members should present for approximately equal amounts of time.
• Audience: Prepare this presentation for an audience of your peers (advanced undergraduate computer science majors).
  • You may assume that the audience knows a good bit about computer science and free and open source software. However, you should not assume that they know anything about the specific project your team is working on or the technologies you have learned about in this activity.
  • When discussing topics that are outside of the audience’s assumed knowledge, context and background sufficient for the audience to follow the presentation must be provided.
• Presentation Materials: The presentation materials should:
  • Use clear and engaging visual materials (slides and/or whiteboard).
  • Employ large fonts, images and diagrams that are very easy for the audience to read, even from the back of the room.
  • Limit the amount of content on each slide so that the audience can absorb it and listen to what is being said.
• Presenters: Individual presenters should:
  • Provide visual cues (e.g. a pointer or highlighting) to clearly indicate which parts of the slide/visual/code are being discussed at each point to assist the audience in following along.
  • Present material in an order and at a pace that allows the audience to follow along.
  • Speak using a clear, audible, engaging, and fluent voice.
  • Deliver content without reading verbatim from notes or slides (it is a good idea to use notes and slides — just don’t read from them word for word).
  • Demonstrate understanding of technical details from the tech spike and the ability to explain these details to the audience.
  • Convince the audience that substantial effort has been invested in the project, equivalent to the expected time investment per week.

Acknowledgements

This assignment builds from and adapts ideas and content from the following activities created by others:

• This version incorporates some elements from a similar assignment used by John MacCormick in 2023.

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All textual materials used in this course are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

All executable code used in this course is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3 or later