Presentations
As a group you should be prepared to give a presentation describing
your project to the class on March 8th. The presentation should be no
longer than 10 minutes. You should include a brief background for
those who may be unfamiliar with your project, a concise statement of
your problem, a list of specifications for your project and some of
your initial ideas for solving the problem. If you want to have
overheads made up for you, get the originals to Amy (room 1-337)
before noon on Monday.
Presentation Pointers:
Start off your presentation with the main point. If you wait till the
end, you may lose your audience.
Stay focused on the point of the presentation. Don't spend too much
time on background material. It is not necessary to present all the
information you found while doing research. Be confident that your
well-informed presentation and handling of questions will show the
background work you have done.
Keep your presentation as concise as possible.
Make sure that your presentation is well-organized. You may want to
include one slide which is an outline of the presentation.
Keep the overhead slides simple (10 - 20 words as a rule of thumb).
Don't put too much information on a single overhead slide. It is better
to have separate slides than to cover part of one up with a piece of
paper.
Use overheads of the same format, it is distracting when a variety of
fonts and orientations are used. You should avoid hand-written
overheads.
Refer to the projected image, rather than reading off the projector.
This allows you to have better eye contact with the audience.
Practice the presentation as a group and critique each other. Try to
identify irritating speech habits (like, um, okay etc.) and eliminate
them. Time the presentation during practice.
Make sure that you have smooth transitions between speakers.
If you are asked a question to which you don't know the answer, don't
just randomly make things up-- you may get caught. If you feel like you
can give a well-considered answer, that is fine. If not, say that you
will look into it.
Try not to be apologetic or make excuses.
This page is maintained by Amy Smith,
mmadinot@mit.edu