Reflection on the presentations today

I think we did really well today.  When it was first announced a week ago that we would be doing the presentations again next week, I wasn't quite sure what we should change for the next one.  Overall, we received pretty good feedback from both the students and Ackley.  But clearly, as shown by today, there was room for improvement.

One thing that I think made today's a lot better was our use of Prezi rather than PowerPoint.  This made the presentation more visually appealing, and having a few more slides really helped me to stay on track, I think.  It was only a few days ago that I decided both me and Alan should have speaking roles in the presentation.  I wanted to change the demo so that there was kind of a "user-version" (the one I gave), which just showed how the application functions in normal use.  Alan then gave the "backend-version", which gave more in-depth info and demonstration of some of the behind-the-scenes intelligent choices the application makes.  I think this kind of two demo approach really improved how we got our message across.  When done this way, the audience gets to see both of whats above and under the covers.  Alan did a great job explaining the graph search we use and it's purpose, I thought.  There were some questions about other stuff we could have added to the presentation; I would like to add more stuff, but don't think we can really afford to do so with a 9 minute hard limit.  I kind of wish that limit would get extended to something like 13-15 minutes.  Perhaps it will be a little more forgiving for the final presentation since we have like 2 hours (rather than 100 minutes for 6 groups).

I think the other groups I saw today also improved.  I really liked PowderAde's presentation.  Kishore did a super good job at explaining similar apps, what they do, and what they don't do that PowderAde does.  The style of his presentation was spot-on, I thought; kind of snarky, but in a good, business-shark kind of way.  David Strawn was suggesting that we could do something similar by showing what your average car repair online forum looks like (they're pretty hideous), as it's about the only thing we could compare our application to.  After all, part of the inspiration for this project was the belief that car forums are very useful for all of the communal car history knowledge they collect (common causes of certain problems on specific cars), but that their knowledge base is vague and hard to quantify.