Senior design enables you to focus on your own project, and push your technical capabilities through it. However, it is very important to learn how to successfully communicate what you’re doing, and why it is cool with the outside world. Thus, a significant component of this class is learning and practicing the non-technical skills of writing and presentation.
It isn’t enough to technically complete your project. You also need to sell it! Presentation skills are very important and relatively rare in graduating undergrads. Thus much of SD will focus on your presentation skills.
Since all projects this year are team projects, the presentations will be team presentations but we will be assessing each team member’s presentation skills.

Fall Semester

Presentation 1 - Elevator Pitch

This presentation will focus on the elevator pitch for your project. Imagine you have a few minutes with someone, and your goals are to have them understand what the project is, why it is important, that it is possible, and your general approach. The intended audience can be investors (VCs) and/or upper management in your organization (not your immediate program/project manager or faculty supervisor).
You should prepare a six minute (four minute presentation + two minute Q and A) “business proposal”. Your goal is to convince us that what you are building is a great idea and that you have some structure in mind to make it a reality.
The presentations should build off the project summary document that you submitted: what are you building and why? Motivation (why build it)? Goals? Users ? Why/how is it different from current products/products/research? Check the rubric outlining expectationd and assessment.

Presentation 2 - Technical Design

The goal of this presentation is to present the technical design of your project to a technically savvy audience such as your project manager/your technical team/research funding agency/faculty supervisor etc. The presentation should assume that they have heard the “elevator pitch” in detail, so your primary goal now is to convince them of the technical innovation and challenges in your project. The technical managers (research funding agency, etc.) need to be convinced not only that the project is viable and innovative but also that it justifies the size of the team (this translates to cost of the project).
You should prepare a (max) 7 minute presentation to describe the overall architecture of your project and convey the technical challenges and innovations, and conclude with your plans for the alpha release. A sample structure of your presentation could be:

  • Start with a brief overview of the system goals (keep this to one minute)
  • Technical innovation: what exactly is technically novel about the project ?
  • Design feasibility: what (types of) technologies/libraries you will make use of, how the pieces will interact, and why do you think the design will work?
  • Provide the system architecture diagram
  • Give a technical description of what the key components are, and who is developing each component
  • Describe what plans for your alpha prototype (plan for 1 minute max on this)
  • Technical challenges and risks: what are the “unknowns” (what have you not figured out, where is the risk)? what is the development cost (lines of code, people, HW etc.)? if you have identified potential roadblocks/points of failure then point these out.

Put particular effort into having a nice visual that helps us understand the components of your system. (In the brief overview of the system, please briefly remind everyone of the motivation and context for your project.) We will use a rubric similar to the first presentation but with more emphasis on the technical description (including the scope and the technical depth of your project).

Presentation 3

The end of Fall semester requires a final Fall presentation (presentation 3) and a demo of the prototype.
This presentation is similar to a combination of Presentation 1 and 2 – you will give a brief overview of both your project motivation and technical design. You should cover these topics:

Intro:

  • Describe the problem to be solved
  • Describe > 1 type of user who will make use of your project
  • How is your project different from similar apps/approaches?

Tech:

  • Overview your implementation using diagrams, algorithms, etc.
  • You likely will want to simplify your overall system diagram to make it easier to cover in a brief presentation compared to how you would present it in a detailed writing report.
  • Discusss the complexity of your algorithm. This doesn’t necessarily mean Big O time complexity, but could also include a description of the type of problem you need to solve and why it requires algorithmic thinking.

Demo:

  • Specify what you have completed so far and will be able to show in your Alpha demo.
  • Present a brief demo of your project. This can be screenshots or a pre-recorded video.
  • In general we do not suggest doing a live demo given the limited time and the need to present from the classroom computer instead of your own machine.
  • The demo can either be a small portion of your presentation, or you may be able to intersperse it with the rest of your presentation (e.g., talk over what you are showing)
  • Briefly cover what remaining features you plan to complete in spring.

Time: 8 minutes. The rubric is similar to Presentation 2 - equal parts weighted on speaking skills and the content including technical complexity. Projects with fewer than 3 members can be shorter; projects with more members can be longer.

Alpha Project Review Demo

The demo is a sit down to talk through the code and the system features. You should plan your demo (i.e., how you will walk us through it) so you convey the features and some use cases, and be ready to discuss key technical aspects.

Spring Semester

Beta Project Review Demo

This demo is a sit down demo to assess progress since the Alpha demo. The demo will be assessed based on the progress since the alpha demo, how you have addressed the feedback (questions and suggestions) fron the alpha demo, and clear specification of the steps needed to provide an end to end working system (with all components integrated).

Presentation 4: Revised Elevator Pitch

This is a revision of your elevator pitch presentation from the fall semester. This presentation should be planned as a 3 minute presentation, and the content can be used towards the final promotional project video you will upload as part of your final package. The presentation should tell the audience what your project does - what problem does it solve, why is it important, and possibly user stories on how the project can be used. The presentation should not get into details on how the project was implemented and how it works (a short slide on this is okay, but the details of “how” should be left to the final presentation). The rubric is similar to Presentation 1 rubric - with equal parts weighted on presentation skill and content (slides, project description of what it does,etc.)

Demo 3: Preliminary Prototype

This is a demo of an “almost completed” project. We will assess whether you have a end to end working system, with all components integrated, and if all project features (as discussed during Alpha and Beta demos) are implemented. The projects should have a near final user interface. After this demo, the goal should be to carry out more testing, debugging and cleaning up the UI based on the feedback you will receive. Grading will take into account the technical complexity of the project.

Final Presentations

This is the final project presentation - and will be similar to Presentation 3 (the end of Fall semester presentation). Introduce your project and state what problem you are solving and what your project does (stick to a few slides and max of 2 minutes to convey this). Next discuss how the project works: Describe the overall architecture of your project – start with brief overview of the system, technical components, what types of technologies/libraries/APIs you used and how the pieces interact. We recommend using videos where possible, possibly with screenshots to highlight key interactions or features. Total Time: 8 minutes. The rubric is similar to Presentation 3 - equal parts weighted on speaking skills and the content. We will have guests attending, and some quests will be evaluating the presentations.

  • You will have a chance to give a practice version of your final presentation in class a few weeks before the official one.
  • You will also need to record a video version of your presentation to include with your final package. You can record this with Zoom or any other video/screen capture type software.

Final Demo

This demo must show your final end to end working system. It will be a sit down demo with the instruction team, and you can use your Mock Demo blueprint to walk the audience through the demo and showcase the project features. Expect to show the code working. Rubric is similar to Alpha Demo but will be weighted on how complete the system is, final features implemented, presence (or absence) of bugs in your system and technical complexity.

  • You will do a practice version of your demo with your instructor mentor a few weeks before the official one.

Final Package

At the end of the semester you must upload the following to our shared drive in a folder for your team name:

  • 100% Demo Slides (PDF)
  • Final Presentation Slides (PDF)
  • Senior Design showcase poster (PDF)
  • A video of your final presentation - one option is to use Zoom to record your talk with screen shared (upload the full video file)

You also must ensure the following are complete:

  • Github repository has all code
  • Your website includes a project description, bio of team members, written documents, poster PDF, and presentation slides.