Student Project Presentations

The student project presentations take place as follows:

BEng/BSc - PR3 takes place during Spring wk 10/ Thursday and Friday

MEng and MMath - PR5 takes place during Summer wk3/ Thursday and Friday

MSc SWE, SCSE, IT, GTC, HCI and NC - takes place during Vacation wk 12/ Wednesday and Thursday

Starting with 2011 the student project presentations will be audio-video taped and the audio-video recordings will be used for marking the project presentation together with the project report. The 2011 student project presentations takes place according to the following timetable :

Participants at the student project presentations

Student - giving the presentation.

Technical assistant - inviting the students in the presentation room and assisting them with any technical problems. If the technical problems are significant he may require assistance from the technical support in the department.

Project presentation chair - an academic that will attend the project presentation and ask questions to the student about the topic presented at the end of the presentation.

Each presentation session consists of 5-6 presentations. Each academic staff member should be expecting attend at least one session of project presentation during the academic year.

Project presentation details

The project presentations will take place in a room from the Computer Science building as specified in the project presentation timetable. In the room there will be one academic who will follow the presentation and ask questions as well as a technical assistant. Students will be invited inside the room by the technical assistants. The students will have to submit their project presentations in the *.pdf format the day before the presentation.

Both the technical person and the academic will have to ensure that the audio-visual recordings are properly done such that they can be used later for marking.

Presentation timing

The project presentation will last 10 minutes, followed by questions by the academic attending the presentation and the student answers. A total of 5 minutes is allocated for questions and answers together with the time allocated for the new student setting his/her presentation. You can use the specific timing left, written on a page indicating to the student when he/she is left with 1 or 2 minutes to present. The presentation should end after 10 minutes and the presenting student should be informed immediately when this happens. The academic should ask a few questions about the project within a total time limit of 5 minutes.

Recordings of the project presentations

The following steps will be followed for the audio-video (AV) recordings of the project presentations

• Cameras on small tripods which are available from the AV centre of the university will be used to record each project presentation during sessions of 5-6 student project presentations. In order to ensure a good audio recording a wired microphone will be used together with the camera. The student will have to ensure that the microphone is switched on.
• The technical person will start the AV recordings at the start of each presentation and will stop them at the end of each student presentations. Each recording file will be subsequently saved and given the first initial and last name of the student.
• The recording camera will be in a fixed position most of the time during the project presentation using a small camera tripod. The technical person will position and manipulate the camera as necessary in order to record all specific aspects of the presentation such as hardware demonstrations or whenever the presenter changes his/her location.
• The academic will verify whether everything goes well with the audio-video recording of the student presentation.
• Due to the usage of a wired microphone, the questions from the session chair cannot be directly recorded. In oder to ensure a good audio recording of both question and answer, the student will have to repeat the questions asked before giving the reply.
• The technical person will take the SD card after finishing 2-3 sessions to a technician who will transfer the video-recordings to the disk space.

Presentation marking

The project presentation will be marked by the markers of the project report using the video recording. The project presentation will be one of the marking points used for assessing the project submitted by the student.

Adrian.Bors@cs.york.ac.uk