Group Presentation

Assignment GP2

This assignment is an in-class group presentation to be made by your team. Each team member should participate actively in preparing and giving the presentation itself. Your presentation should last no more than 10 minutes. There will be additional time for questions.

The presentation should address the following questions:

  1. What specific problem are you focussing on?
  2. Given the information you have collected, what is the current situation with respect to this problem?
  3. What is your proposed proof-of-concept design idea?
  4. What evidence do you have that this idea could help solve the problem?

In your presentation, you should use tables, charts, photos, video, diagrams, participant quotations etc. to communicate your design idea and the information you collected which motivates and justifies your idea.

The presentation will be assessed primarily in terms of how effectively you communicate the essential content of your project and how well you work together as a team.

This assignment counts for 25% of total course marks. Every team member will receive the same mark for the presentation, on condition that he/she gives part of the presentation. (This condition will only be waived in exceptional circumstances.)

Important: The team representative should upload a PDF version of the slides to Learn by 16:00, Wednesday 23rd March.

Guidance on Presentations

  1. As a rule of thumb, have 1 slide for each minute of presentation.
  2. Slides should engage the interest of the audience by presenting ideas and information in a transparent and arresting way. Good graphics and images are often an effective means of doing this.
  3. Reduce clutter. Keep bullet points to a minimum. Don’t put more one than one graph on a slide (unless your intention is to draw a contrast between two related graphs).
  4. Do not treat your slides as presentation notes and do not just read your slides to the audience. This means that you need to prepare what you are going to say in advance of giving the presentation.
  5. Break your presentation into sections, in the same way that you should break a written reseach report into sections. Each section of the presentation should have a clear, easy-to-grasp message.
  6. Make sure you signal the structure of your presentation to your audience. Have a conclusion slide with a take-home message.
  7. Do at least one dry-run of your presentation. Get a friendly critic to watch the presentation (or one team member should play this role). The critic should check for:
    • keeping to time
    • clarity and intelligibility of individual slides (viewed from the back of the room)
    • clear overall structure of the talk
    • needless overlap between different parts of the presentation