Project presentations

Your project presentations are, like your progress reports, short presentations on your project, to us, your instructors, and the rest of the class.

The project presentations should be 7 minutes. You should present from the laptop of one of your group. We will bring monitors to make it easier to see. You can use Cocalc, or the Jupyter Notebook, or slide presentation software, or any mixture of these.

We will video the presentations, to make sure we grade them all in the same way.

The project presentation differs from the progress report, in that your aim is to get quickly to your main conclusions, and the evidence for these conclusions. A good presentation will help your listeners engage with your analysis, and think about new questions to ask.

This is a general rule for good science: aim to engage, not to impress.

• Summarize your data
• Describe your main analysis strategy
• Describe your main findings.
• Draw conclusions with care, citing evidence from your data, and from any relevant literature.

If all your analyses have so far proved negative or inclusive, that’s fine too. Say what you tried, what evidence you were able to find and whether you need new evidence or a new analysis strategy. You might also conclude that your initial hypothesis was wrong, and that the data gives evidence against it. Say what that evidence is.

We like presentations where many or all of the team contribute, but choose the best format to give the most concise information for us to give feedback.

We will ask questions to the whole team, so each member should know the project in reasonable detail.

Please negotiate with your team about who prepares and does the presentation. Like all work on the project, this counts towards your project contribution - see the rubric.