Demonstration Guidelines

Source: https://projects.scss.tcd.ie/information-for-students/demonstration-guidelines/ Parent: https://projects.scss.tcd.ie

Each student must give a presentation and (where appropriate) a demonstration of their final year project or dissertation to an audience consisting of the supervisor and the second reader.

• It is normal to invite other interested staff and postgraduate students to attend these presentations.  Normally this would be no more than 2 or 3 people.  If a student is concerned about this, just let your supervisor know, and this can be constrained. In the case of students taking the BA(Mod) in Computer Science the project supervisor and a randomly allocated second reader will attend the presentations.
• Demonstrations are usually set to be ‘on-the-hour’ and ‘on-the-half-hour’.
• Normally, you will be expected to setup your demonstration at the beginning of the slot – If your demonstration will take a long time to set up, you should make special arrangements.
• Most students should budget for  about 15 minutes of presentation, 10 minutes of demonstration and questions and 5 minutes for the changeover.
• Prepare your presentation for an audience consisting of competent computer scientists who may not be very familiar with the area of your project
• Don’t start from the ‘beginning of time’…Once computers were very big etc….
• Clearly distinguish what is your work from what existed before you started the project
• Try to relax – the supervisor and second reader are trying to find out what is good about your project – they are not tying to catch you out.

You might also find it helpful to look at the powerpoint slides for the presentation on “project demos and project reports”.

Demo Location

Under normal circumstances project demonstrations will take place in one of two nominated locations.  If there are additional hardware requirements which cannot be easily set up in these locations, project demonstrations may be done elsewhere (at the discretion of the supervisor).