5 Points
An extremely engaging 5-minute presentation of your project to a lay audience.
Key requirements:
- Explain your client / technology / project to an audience that knows next to nothing about any of them
- Communicate emotion, not just knowledge. Your primary mission isn’t to tell the audience about your work. It’s to help them understand why they should care about / be interested in:
- who your client is
- the problem you were asked to solve
- why the technology you’re working with is worth learning about
- Your presentation should ooze quality. It should be abundantly clear that you:
- Sweated the details of your slides.
- Rehearsed this thing within an inch of its life.
In terms of content, the only requirements are to explain and demonstrate your project. That’s it. The rest is completely up to you.
If you’re feeling stuck, paths taken by previous capstone groups include:
- A super-polished traditional tech keynote.
- Audience interaction (ask questions, ask them to imagine things, ask them to raise hands if they’ve…, etc.)
- Small bits of drama / comedy (if you have the chops to pull this off; if in doubt, err on the side of caution)
- Small bits of bespoke prerecorded video
- What does this look like? A lot of things: not just using stock templates (especially Google Slides), minimal text per slide, almost always one large image per slide (vs. multiple small images on a single slide), using modern devices for screenshots, etc., following your project’s style guide to a T., etc., etc., etc.↩
- Specifically: engaging opening, smooth transitions, absolutely zero reading from slides, clear, defined ending, and absolute confidence in your technology (which includes having a backup plan for if your technology fails).↩