Final Project 3: oral presentation
Minor changes to this document may still be made. We’re sharing it now to give you an idea of what to expect.
Overview
The third Final Project checkpoint is a short oral presentation about your Final Project, given in class on Monday, December 7th, or Wednesday, December 9th. You can earn 15 points with this presentation.
Directions and grading
Submission expectations
- You will give your presentation live in class on December 7th or 9th — we will share the schedule in advance. You must notify the instructors well in advance if you would like to request an alternative arrangement.
Rubric
You can earn a total of 15 points across the following aspects:
| Aspect | Points | What we look for |
|---|---|---|
| Project context | 3 | Clear background and goals: what data, and why this project? |
| Technical content | 4 | What you did and how: workflow, tools, scripts, and (preliminary) results |
| Delivery and clarity | 3 | Clear slides and explanations, staying within the time limit |
| Answers to questions | 3 | Thoughtful answers to questions from your peers and the instructors |
| Questions for other students | 2 | Asking relevant questions about other students’ presentations |
Detailed instructions
Format
Aim for your presentation to take 6 minutes, followed by about 3 minutes of questions from your peers and the instructors.
Since we only have 10 minutes for each presentation, we will stop you after 7 minutes if you have not finished. You will really want to avoid this situation, because you will lose points for not staying within the time limit, and likely for not covering all the required aspects of your project.
Use slides for at least part of your presentation. Optionally, you can switch to VS Code, RStudio, and/or GitHub to show or even demo parts of your project.
It is up to you whether you show some of your code line by line, or stick to a higher-level overview of what you’ve done.
Attend both presentation sessions: asking other students questions about their presentations is part of your grade. For full points, ask at least one question in each session.
Suggested structure
Context: general background about the data or research project, and the goals of your Final Project.
What you did: an overview of your workflow (a simple diagram of the steps, scripts, and tools works well), some (preliminary) results if you have them, and one challenge you ran into and how you solved it (or didn’t!).
What’s next: what you still want to do before your final submission — and if you used your own data, what you plan to do after the course ends.
You are not expected to have finished your project, but you are expected to have made significant progress since your progress report (FP2).