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Presenting at the UK Imagine Cup finals - oh my....

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Nearly every Computing degree in the UK requires, at some point, students to get up in front of their peers and lecturers and talk about a piece of work or project they have completed towards their degree mark. Having been one of those students and had the opportunity at Microsoft to sit on some of those presentations I know how daunting that can be!

If you are one of the teams who have already submitted your Round 1 entry or are working towards that submission date (1st March - 9 days to go!!) then you should start thinking about the next step in the competition. On the 10th March we will be holding a UK final with a top 10 Poster round and final 3 Presentation round. I wanted to expand on what the Presentation round will entail and how you can best prepare for it.

The presentation will be to an audience including the judges and will be the teams opportunity to 'sell' their entry and concept to the judges (and audience). By 'sell' I mean take the audience on a journey through your entry telling them about the problem chosen, the solution proposed, how you would design a system, what benefits that system will deliver its users and a demo of the sample code (if appropriate).

The format will be roughly as follows:

- 10 minutes presentation
- 10 minutes for Q&A from the judges.
- Roughly 10 minutes overflow for run-overs.

10 minutes for a presentation isn't very long and i've intentionally left that as 10 minutes with room for error as any presenter will know it is very easy to run over. So this gives the best format structure for the team to deliver a great presentation and have enough room to answer questions and get on/off stage.

The presentation should cover the following sections (this is a very rough outline and great teams will tailor their content and style to suit their entry):

- Introduction (introduction team; university background; what the audience is going to see today)
- Problem outline: what problem is your IC entry fixing (diet, healthcare, medicine, fitness). One of the best things people can do is to demonstrate this with a casestudy or story about a real person.
- Solution outline: what is your solution in a single slide summary
- Benefits and Features
- Design and Architecture
- Futures: what you will do next to make it a reality and how it could be turned into a commercial business
- Conclusion: summarise the complete presentation, thank the audience and open up the floor to the judges for questions.

This is not easy to do in 10 minutes but I'm sure with some careful planning and a little practice you can pull off a professional presentation.

Finally, I wanted to leave you with some tips that I would apply to my presentations if in the same shoes as the lucky final 3.

1. Take your time! Don't rush a presentation as the information will get muddled and forgotten about
2. Less is more. The 80/20 rule applies here - a lot of information can be put across in a very succinct manner
3. Apply structure to your presentation. I use a GRID layout with key sections and reminder prompt words to ensure I have structure to follow and won't get lost (and when you deliver lots of 1hr+ technical presentations it is easy to lose your way).
4. Have a lead presenter with supporting work. Everyone presentation could be difficult to manage and listen to. By having a single lead presenter who can do the majority of talking and supporting team members for particular sections works well.
5. Use PowerPoint carefully. Many presenters, including a lot of Microsofties, use PowerPoint as a safety net and do a brain dump of their presentation onto the slides. And they proceed to read the slides - very dull and un-inspiring for the audience. That is not what PowerPoint is for - use slides as aids for the presentation and talk about them, not to them!
6. Images and Diagrams can provide a lot of information in an easy to digest format and will prevent point 5 above from happening.
7. Cliched but RELAX! The audience are hear to listen to you and are not out to get you. So enjoy the experience!
8. Keep an eye on the clock - it doesn't help to runover as it pushes the judges for questions in less time and they are the ones who have the power to send you to Delhi

Some links to real presentation guidance:

- https://www.presentationzen.com/ 

- https://blogs.technet.com/jesper_johansson/archive/2006/02/09/419154.aspx

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