Presentation Outline and Guidelines

This is not a grading rubric, but I do believe great presentations incorporate all of these pieces in roughly this order.

Contents of a proposal slide show

Motivating question or problem – convince me there’s something out there that needs fixed
Technical tools – Briefly explain a technological/scientific/mathematical tool that can be applied to your problem
YOUR SOLUTION – how are you planning to fix the problem? (apply technology to motivating question)
Proposal – how do you envision the tech being applied to the problem and what are you going to learn/do/make?
Timeline – very high level, but try to identify 3-4 key steps along the way. Big pieces you need to fit together. Convince me you have though about this enough to understand how to start going about it
Related work (this could go earlier too) – what exists? Convince me this is close to something that’s already been done. Otherwise it’s not likely to succeed
Conclusion – short and sweet but don’t just end with a slide that says “Questions?” or “here are my references”. This could be “directions for future research” or “extensions”, or just a final sell like “I hope that this project will make Mighty-Plant available to every house in Loudoun County, cleaning the air while killing the Invasive Spotted Lantern Fly!”

Do NOT read your slides.
Do NOT cram your slides full of words. 30 words max per slide, usually much fewer (exceptions should be rare)
Do NOT put fancy looking equations and figures on your slide that you don’t understand, in order to convince the audience you are smart or your topic is hard.
Do include charts, graphs, photos when appropriate
Try to make an AI-generated mock-up of your product to include (if this is reasonable for your topic).
The slides accentuate your talk, they are not your talk.
Google slides is lame – ask my class from last year what they used.