Exercises: Presentation and communication

Name four elements or resources that help in the oral presentation of a project (slides, script, prototype...) and explain what each one contributes.

Explain what a technology project report or dossier is and what minimum sections it should include.

The figure summarises the structure of a project presentation, but the last step is missing. State which step it is and what content it should have.

Write five tips for public speaking during a project presentation (voice, eye contact, posture, pace, rehearsals) and explain in one sentence why they work.

Explain what information should appear on the first slide of a project presentation and why it is important.

What is an "elevator pitch"? Explain approximately how long it lasts, what its purpose is, and which three ideas it must contain.

Differentiate between a poster and a slide as formats for communicating a project: what changes in the amount of text, font size and the way people "navigate" them.

Name three ways to document the project process using images (photos, scanned sketches, video) and explain what each brings to the final report.

A slide has sixteen lines of text in small font and the presenter reads it all, word for word. Point out two communication problems in this scenario and explain how to fix them.

You are going to present the same prototype twice: to your classmates and to a panel of business professionals. Explain what you would change between both presentations in terms of language, level of detail and duration.

Your team must submit the report for a lollipop stick bridge. Draft the table of contents for that report and justify why you would include photographs and sketches of the construction process.

A slide is titled "Miscellaneous project stuff". Propose three alternative headlines that communicate better, each highlighting a different idea (the problem, the process or the outcome), and justify them.

In a four-person team presentation, one person never speaks and another talks throughout. Propose a balanced division of the presentation (who presents which part) and justify it considering the strengths of each role.

Explain how to cite an image or data taken from the internet in the project report, and why failing to cite them is an academic and legal issue.

Your audience is families without technical background. Rewrite these two sentences so they understand them without losing accuracy: "the equivalent resistance of the circuit is $350\ \Omega$" and "the part was obtained using additive manufacturing".

Design the structure of a scientific poster about your project: blocks it will have, visual hierarchy (what is seen first) and what should be understandable in just 30 seconds of looking at it.

Your team has designed a waste sorter with a colour sensor and a servomotor for the workshop, but the final cost (42,50 €) exceeded the budget limit of 30,00 € and the detection reliability is 82 % under variable ambient light. Design the script for an elevator pitch presentation of exactly 2 minutes before the school management team to convince them to fund an improved version. Structure the time in second blocks, write the impactful opening, explain how you will justify the extra cost and technical margin of error without losing credibility, and formulate a clear call to action.

A team presents a home alarm system using Arduino. For 5 minutes, the speaker projects 15 slides packed with C++ source code and miniature wiring diagrams, speaks with their back turned reading from the screen, and does not show the working prototype until the bell rings. At the end, the audience asks no questions and the panel indicates that they did not understand the practical utility of the product. Analyse the three critical technical communication errors made, explain their cognitive impact on the audience, and restructure the presentation into four effective time phases indicating what to show and what to remove in each one.

Your team has developed an automated pill dispenser for elderly people combining open-source code under a GNU GPLv3 license and an adapted part from Thingiverse with a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Design the technical dissemination strategy across two media: a physical booth for the municipal science fair and an outreach video for social media. Justify which technical content to prioritise in each medium, how you must attribute and legally comply with both licenses when distributing documentation, and what consent protocol you must follow if you film real users testing the device.

You must explain the operation of a regenerative braking system developed in the workshop to two completely different audiences: a) 1st year ESO students during an open day; b) A panel of engineers at a school technology competition. For each case, define which analogy or visual aid you would use and why it is appropriate for that level of abstraction, what level of mathematical or physical rigour you should include, and write the exact sentence with which you would explain the transformation of kinetic energy into electrical energy without incurring scientific inaccuracies.

A classmate has to present the development of an IoT weather station in 4 minutes, but intends to merely read aloud the 12 pages of the technical report (including sensor calibration tables and full component lists). Design an analytical co-evaluation rubric to guide their rehearsals before the final presentation. The rubric must cover four technical criteria (information hierarchy, visual aid design, terminological rigour, and time management), defining observable and measurable descriptors for each at three levels: 'Insufficient', 'Acceptable', and 'Excellent'.

During the defence of an automated Arduino greenhouse, the panel raises two critical objections: 1) 'If the power supply or Wi-Fi network fails, the plants die in a matter of hours because you have not provided manual redundancy or an acoustic alert'; 2) 'You claim the system saves 35,5 % of water, but you have only recorded measurements over 3 winter days'. Design the technical response strategy for both objections: acknowledge the prototype's limitations with technical honesty, justify what design constraints led to those decisions, and propose the specific hardware and testing improvements you would implement in a second phase.

Analyse the following excerpt from an oral project presentation: «Hello, we made this robotic arm because we were too lazy to pick up parts by hand, haha. The gripper failed 70 % of the time and we almost burned the workshop down by misconnecting a transistor, it was a fun disaster. But hey, the servos have a torque of 9,8 kg·cm and the rubber's coefficient of friction is 0,65, so in theory it works great». Identify three serious errors of tone, credibility, and technical rigour in the speech. Then, rewrite the passage, turning the transistor failure and the gripper error into a constructive technical argument that demonstrates learning and error engineering.

You have the experimental results of a bending test on 3D-printed parts with different infill densities (20 %, 50 %, and 100 %) and layer orientations (0° and 90°). Design how you would communicate these results in three formats: a printed technical poster, a 60-second demonstration video, and a three-post thread on social media. For each format, determine what type of graphical representation you would use, what quantitative data point you would highlight, and what secondary information you would deliberately discard, justifying the loss of detail based on the channel and the audience's attention span.