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

Sprint Planning

Spring will be broken into sprints that run until the end of January, February, March, and April. At the start of each sprint each team will:

Make a sprint plan that defines the high level goals for the sprint, and add this to their Readme. Preparing this plan will be the subject of the first Instructor meeting in each sprint.
Break the sprint down into smaller tasks added to their sprint board. Preparing this breakdwon will be the subject of the first Alumni Mentor meeting in each sprint.

Spring Demos

In Spring you will have a demo after each monthly sprint. At the start of Februrary, students will give an individual demo, showing off what they have accomplished since the end of Fall. At the start of March, you will give your demo as a team, ideally showing both further individual progress and evidence of integration. At the start of April you will do another individual demo, and then the final demo (described below) will be in the middle of April.

Spring Code Reviews

You will be expected to provide code reviews for other members of your team. One student will need to create a Pull Request and another student (or students) must provide feedback using the github commenting interface. Try to provide overall comments as well as some line specific comments. Each team will need to ensure that all students have a chance to make a PR and review someone else’s PR.

The goal of this presentation is to give you more direct practice with speaking skills. Your group will present the same slides that you used at the end of Fall–you do not need to update them. While you are giving the presentation we will interrupt you and give you specific feedback on something we’d like you to focus on (for example improving eye contact or raising your volume), then we’ll have you repeat your slide focusing on that skill. Thus the content of your slides is less important (in fact, you can choose to talk about anything you want), but we want to have a tight loop between you practicing a skill and getting feedback.

Final Presentations

This is the final project presentation - and will be similar to Presentation 3 (the end of Fall semester presentation). Your presentation should include these topics:

Motivation:

Describe the problem to be solved and motivate why it is useful/important/exciting
Describe > 1 type of user who will make use of your project
How is your project different from similar apps/approaches?

Technical Achievements:

Overview your implementation using diagrams, algorithms, etc.
Show an overall system diagram or set of diagrams to show how the project is structured and how components interact.
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:

Demonstrate that your project is funcitonal. 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)

Total Time: 8 minutes. You will be graded on both your speaking skills and the content. We will have guests attending, and some quests may help evaluate 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.

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/algorithmic complexity.

Final Package

At the end of the semester you must upload the following to your team’s github website and google drive. Your website should include:

A project description and bio of team members
Final Presentation Slides (PDF)
Senior Design showcase poster (PDF)
Writing 4 (PDF)
Link to Github repository with all code

Your google drive upload should include everything on the website plus a zipfile of your Github repo. You should upload to your team folder here.