For those of you who don't have much experience giving presentations,
here are a few pointers.
Preparation
Especially if you are unsure about your topic, it is better to start
working on it as early as possible, and discuss it with me if you have
doubts. Of course you can wait until the day before the due date,
and then pull an allnighter, but the outcome of this strategy
may be a little risky.
Structure
There are many ways of arranging the information to be conveyed in a
presentation, and you can use your own experience and judgement for it.
A relatively "safe" way of doing it is to use a structure similar to
my lectures:
Overview: Introduce the main parts of the presentation.
Introduction: Describe why this problem is important (or at least
interesting), and how it relates to the general topic of the class.
If necessary, give some background information on issues the audience
may not be familiar with.
Description of the System, Concept, or Method:
This is the technical part of the presentation, where you discuss
the design of the system, or the main ideas of the concept or method.
Implementation: What are the tools and techniques used for
the implementation, and which problems needed to be overcome.
Experimentation and Evaluation: What experiments were performed
to demonstrate that the system works, and how was its performance
evaluated.
Conclusions: Recapitulate the most important points of your
presentation (the ones you want your audience to remember)
References: List the sources for your information
For a short presentation such as this one, you may have to address
some of the above issues very briefly, or skip them entirely.
You can also include a short demonstration, if this is feasible.
If you use transparencies or PowerPoint, a rough guideline is
to calculate two to three minutes for each presentation, so
if your presentation has 20 slides, you're going overboard.
Practice
Especially if you don't have much experience with this, you may
be nervous about standing in front of an entire class, and talking
about a topic you don't really know well.
Being well prepared generally helps with keeping nerves in check,
but you can also give one or more trial presentations to one or
two friends (maybe your team mates are willing to help here).
This is especially helpful for timing issues. Most often,
it will take you longer to give the presentation than you
initially think.
Readability
Use a large font, and don't try to squeeze too much onto one transparency.
In PowerPoint, you should reserve fonts of less than about 20 point
(it also depends on the font type) to things that are not critical for your
audience to read. If you're trying to economize by simply copying
your Web pages onto transparencies, most likely you'll end up
with too much stuff on one slide, in a font that is far too small.
In most cases, it is better to list important aspects as phrases
("bullet points"), rather than formulating it in complete sentences.
In our field, most presenters speak without a script, explaining
issues shown on the transparency or the screen. Except for
short, important statements like definitions, don't read
the text written on your transparency to the audience:
They can read it faster than you pronounce it, and it
quickly gets boring. If you're afraid that you're too nervous
to speak freely, you can read from a prepared script, but
then your transparencies should only contain the most
important issues in short phrases, not the text you're
reading.
The Big Moment
Now that you're well prepared, almost nothing can go wrong.
Of course, you still may be a little nervous, and then you
can't get your file displayed on the computer projector.
The backup transparencies you've prepared are in your car
in the parking lot way at the other end of campus.
The idea to save paper by making two-sided handouts worked
nicely, except that the same page is printed on both sides.
And by now you're sweating so profusely that the ink on your
cheat sheet starts to dissolve.
Well, don't worry, almost all of the above has happened to
me, although not necessarily during the same presentation.
It's Over
Before you realize it, your ten minutes are over, and
you've even been able to utter a few additional sentences
in response to all the smart questions that came up
after your presentation. Now you can sit back, relax,
and enoy all those other interesting presentations to come.
There's that minor issue of grades for the presentation,
but, first of all, it's over, and of course the only
question is whether you'll get all twentyfive points, or only
twentyfour ;-)