Year 4 Maths/CS Students Only!
This material is only relevant to people taking COMSM0142 (i.e. year 4 maths/CS MEng students). If you’re a single-honours MEng student, you’re on COMSM0052 and should check out the innovation case on Blackboard here. Otherwise, you’re taking COMS30044 (for year 3 maths/CS students) or COMS30045 (for single honours students) and either way you only need to worry about the dissertation.
What is the presentation?
As part of your project, you’ll give a 15-minute talk (with slides) to a panel of markers with the other COMSM0142 students in the audience, with a brief pause afterwards for questions. These questions will not be deep and technical (as you might encounter in a viva), and you shouldn’t need to spend any additional time preparing for them. This talk will be worth 10% of your overall project mark, with the remaining 90% coming from your dissertation.
You should aim your talk at the level of new year 3 students who are familiar with everything taught in year 1, who are mostly familiar with the mandatory units of year 2 but may need a refresher on harder concepts, and who know nothing about the year 3 units. Your goal is to communicate:
- What you’re doing for your project and how it’s going.
- Why you care about it, and why your audience should care as well.
- At least one idea from the technical side of your project that a new year 3 student would be unfamiliar with.
You do not need your talk to be an accurate overview of your project as it will be submitted in May, and your mark will be independent of how well your wider project is going. (In fact, if a member of the marking panel is supervising your project, they’ll recuse themselves from the discussion of your mark.) You’re already being assessed on your project as a whole in the dissertation component. Here we’re only concerned with your ability to effectively present to an audience on both technical and non-technical material, and your project is just a convenient topic to use for that.
Further details are discussed in the first workshop, linked below.
The membership of the marking panel is still being finalised, but will include Christian Konrad, John Lapinskas, and Michael Wray. A more formal description of the assessment along with a mark scheme is available here.
You should submit your slides in advance of the presentations themselves on Blackboard here (scroll to the bottom). The deadline is the start of the presentations, i.e. 2pm on March 7th.
Schedule and Materials
| Date | Time | Title | Location | Materials |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 02/02/2024 | 1pm-3pm | Workshop 1: Intro and speaking technique | Ada SM3 | Slides, recording |
| 16/02/2024 | 2pm-4pm | Workshop 2: Outlining and slides | Ada SM4 | Slides, recording, TOPp SEkrEt |
| 23/02/2024 | Workshop 3: Looking at drafts | Ada SM4 | Recording | |
| 26/02/2024 | N/A | Reading week! | N/A | N/A |
| 04/03/2024 | 11am-1pm | Workshop 4: Practice presentations | Physics 3.34 | Recording |
| 07/03/2024 | 2pm-5pm | Presentations | Queens 1.68 | N/A |
| Weeks 8-9 | N/A | Marks and feedback | N/A | N/A |
Contacts
If you have any questions about this part of the unit, please contact John Lapinskas here.