Purpose

The purpose of this assignment is for you to present your course project to the class.  This will allow the class see "case studies" of their peers' work.

This assignment is not meant to take a lot of your time -- it should probably take you about 1 hour (per person) to prepare the PowerPoint file, and 1 hour to prepare for the presentation itself.  If it is taking you more time, please see me.

PowerPoint deliverable

You will have to submit (by 11 a.m. on 27 March) a single PowerPoint file that you will use to give your presentation.  You are welcome to develop the presentation in OpenOffice, of course -- but this particular submission must be exported to PowerPoint prior to submission.  The details of how you format the slides are up to you..  You will notice that my lecture notes are very sparse (I personally don't like reading from slides).  I have seen others that have zero text (only images) in their slides.  Many others have much more verbose slides.  You need to figure out what works best for you and your presentation style, and go with it.  Typically, people who do not have a lot of experience presenting will often put more text on their slides.  Note that if you do have a lot of text on a single slide, you should have it appear in various steps (via PowerPoint animations) -- having it all there at once will cause people to tune out to what you are saying while they read the slide (hence why my slides have so little text on them).

The images in your slide set should be content that you have already prepared -- in particular, the Visio diagrams that you have written as deliverables for the various homeworks.  Wikimedia Commons is a great place to find images that are free to use.  The expectation is that you won't need more graphical content that this, although you are welcome to do so.  You will need to add text to the slides, of course, as described above.

The PowerPoint file will be graded (more details on this to follow).

Topic coverage

Here are some ideas what to cover in your presentation

• What idea you chose, and why you chose it
• Your language choice.  Did this cause issues with the implementation?  Other implementation issues (GUIs used, etc.)
• How you laid out the classes -- the domain model would be useful here
• Challenges you faced, and how you solved them
• The use cases that you wrote (and thus the first ones that you implemented).  This is a quick overview of the use cases, not a fully dressed use case recital
• Design patterns you used, and how they helped out, and how they fit into the design model (or how they solved a problem).  Saying you used an iterator to iterate through a list is not particularly interesting or noteworthy.  Stating that you used a Builder to solve the problem of how to generate your world map is a relevant application of a design pattern.
• If any of the other deliverables were particularly interesting (SSDs, operation contracts, etc.), include these.  Generally, though, these will be more detail than is needed
• How you might change the project, now that you have gone through a few iterations
• Etc.

The idea here is to give details about your project.  You don't have to stick to these topic points.

Submission details

Everybody will have to create the deliverable, a single PowerPoint file called presentation1.ppt.  This will be submitted electronically, and is due by 11 a.m. on the day of the presentations (27 March 2006).  A few people will be randomly chosen to give the presentations (as many as can fit into a single class period); however, everybody will be graded on the slide set that is submitted.

Presenting in class

I will roll a die to select who will be giving presentations that day.  If you are in a group, you do not need to have all of your group members present (although you are welcome to do so).  However, your group still needs to present for the required time period.  A person doing the project by him/herself should expect to give a 5 minute presentation; a group should expect to give a 10 minute presentation.  The files will be loaded onto my tablet prior to class.

Special circumstances

If you have special circumstances (such as issues with the senior thesis deadline, or serious stage fright giving presentations), please send me an e-mail (BEFORE the deadline), and we can discuss it.