PP04 - H/FOSS Project Poster

Posters have become a common mechanism for presenting project results at professional meetings and conferences. This assignment provides experience developing a poster and presenting your work in a less formal small group or one-on-one setting. Teams will develop a poster draft, peer review posters from other teams, revise their poster and present it to the broader College Community during a poster session.

Resources

Your team should review the following resources before you begin creating your poster:

• Ten Simple Rules for a Good Poster Presentation from PLos Computational Biology, May 2007.
• Make a Good Poster - Video and tips from the Undergrad Research and Independent Projects site at Stanford.
• Effective Poster Presentations from the Center for Innovation and Research in Teaching at Grand Canyon University. The embedded videos are helpful!

The Poster

The poster should aim to introduce a broad audience to the team’s work over the past academic year. This should include:

• Giving information about the H/FOSS project to which the team is contributing, the communities that the project aims to serve, and the impact that the project is having.
• Highlighting several (but not necessarily all) of the teams contributions in a way that a broad audience is able to clearly understand the effect that the team’s contributions have (or have aimed) to have on the project.
• Provide technical details that support a deeper conversation about several (but not necessarily all) of the team’s contributions with audience members who have a more technical backgrounds or interests.
• Reflections on the team’s experiences working on the project, interacting with the project community, lessons learned that will be helpful to your future selves, and any other interesting take-aways that the team would like to talk about.

Requirements

• Posters should be created as a single PowerPoint slide.
  • Your poster must be 24-1/2” x 36-1/2”.
  • You must maintain a 1” margin around the outside of the poster. This margin ensures that no content will be cut off when the poster is printed.
  • A search for PowerPoint Poster Templates will find lots of free downloadable PowerPoint poster templates that you can adopt or adapt if you like. Or, you can express your own style laying everything out yourself!
  • Poster titles should be legible from 20 feet. Other content should be clearly legible from 4-6 feet. This page on Designing a Professional Poster gives some good advice about fonts and font sizes to meet those objectives.

Content Criteria

Teams should ask the questions below about their poster. Affirmative answers will be indicative of high quality posters.

• Is the poster content visually appealing and legible from the appropriate distance?
• Will the audience understand the purpose of the H/FOSS project to which the team is contributing, the community it is aiming to serve, and the impact it is having?
• Will the audience understand the effect of (some of) the contributions that the team has worked on in the project?
  • If your team has worked on multiple contributions, it is not necessary to include the details of all of them. Your poster should focus on a few of the more interesting contributions that you will be able explain quickly and clearly.
• Are the details of the contribution(s) contained on the poster sufficient to support an in depth conversation about the details of at least one contribution with a technical audience without being overwhelming?
• Will the audience gain insight into what the team’s experience in contributing to their project has been like and what they have learned from the experience?

PP04-a - Poster Draft & Peer Review

All team members must place a copy of the poster draft (.pptx file) into a Poster folder in their COMP492 folder in their individual WiD repositories on GitHub by 8:00am on the assigned due date. Use a filename with the suffix -draft.pptx to make it clear that the file contains your poster draft. You will upload a final version later.

In class on the due date for the poster draft, teams will peer review the poster drafts of other teams. A detailed peer review rubric will be provided.

PP04-b - Final Poster Submission & Printing

All team members must place a copy of the final poster (.pptx file) into the Poster folder in their COMP492 folder in their individual WiD repositories on GitHub by 8:00am on the assigned due date. Use a filename with the suffix -final.pptx to make it clear that the file contains your final poster.

One member of the team must submit the poster to the Dickinson College Print Center for printing. The Mathematics and Computer Science Department will pay for one copy of the poster to be printed. Any reprints or “rush” printing fees due to late submission must be paid for by the teams. Directions for submitting the poster for printing will be provided on the Course’s Teams Channel.

PP04-c - Poster Presentation

All team members must attend the Poster Session and participate in the presentation of the team’s poster. The session will be divided into three time intervals. During each time interval, some portion of the team will be responsible for presenting the poster, while the others will be free to visit the other posters. Teams are responsible for ensuring that the presentation time is divided equitably among all team members.

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