In the fall you designed and delivered a nontechnical presentation to an audience pretending to be venture capitalists. This spring you'll get a chance to exercise presentation skills in a slightly different way.

The goal of this presentation is to explain some technical feature(s) of your project.

You can assume the audience is reasonably geeky, and wants to know about engineering and coding ideas/tricks/details. Several of the guests who were at the fall presentation will be at this one too. So will other members of the faculty. I hope other (graduate) students will come too -- you can help make that happen by recruiting your friends.

That doesn't mean that the whole talk should be at the same technical depth. A good guide is to make the first third intelligible to, say, a good senior CS major (remember what you knew then) and the last third appropriate for a more senior more experienced techie who might have been bored at the beginning but who will learn new things at the end. The middle third is a transition between those two modes.

Make sure the audience knows the level at each stage - warn the techies at the beginning that hard stuff will come later, warn the newbies near the end that they may be lost for a while.

At each level, concentrate on the important ideas. Just because it's technical doesn't mean the slides are full of code.

Be prepared to elaborate when asked a question. In fact, you want to provoke questions, else you can't be sure your audience is awake. Treat each one respectfully, but don't think you have to answer every one in detail on the spot. If there's a short response, give it and return to your main thread. If you don't know, say so. You can suggest taking things off line. Don't ramble.

Some possible things to cover

• Choice of tools/environments.

• An example of a part of the development that went particularly well, and why you think it did.

• An example of a part of the development that went particularly badly, why you think it did, what you learned, and how you would do that part differently the next time.

• How your project mixed the chance to use things you knew (from school or work) with the chance to learn new things you knew nothing about.

Each team will prepare a single presentation. Two or three team members will participate in delivering it. Make sure the presentation is consistent in style - don't have each person prepare the slides for his or her section. Perhaps after you have written the slides you should each practice delivering the whole thing, so that you could do any part of it when the time comes.

Your presentation should take about (and no more than) half an hour, with perhaps ten minutes to answer questions, both during and after.

I'll decide on the order by lot, at the last minute.

You must use powerpoint (awful as it can be). Powerpoint is a professional necessity these days - using it well is an art. You might want to look at Edward Tufte's PowerPoint Is Evil diatribe and some of the discussion about it on the web.

You may want to prepare handouts in advance with more detailed material, though you can't assume the audience will have read them.

You may access the web during the presentation if you wish. But be warned - live demos can be exciting, but they're risky. Fumbling with the keyboard and mouse and finding broken links does not create a good impression.

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