Oral Presentations

Rules:

The rules for the oral presentations are simple.

• You need to pick any scientific topic and talk about it as a group.
• The time you will be allotted will amount to five minutes per person, so if you assemble a three-person group, you will have fifteen minutes to present your work.
• You must assemble a set of visual aids to accompany your oral presentation. Many of you will choose to create these visuals in PowerPoint or Keynote format, but you do not have to do so. Some of them can be pure-text material, but they will have more effectiveness if you include some actual illustrations or other non-textual material.
• You must turn in your visuals as an e-mail attachment or on a CD or a USB memory stick by 11:59pm of the night before you give your presentation. This allows Prof. Irving or me the chance to put the presentation onto our own laptops so that we don't have to take a lot of extra time in between presentations switching back and forth between the faculty laptops and the student laptops. Failure to abide by this rule will result in an automatic deduction of fifteen points from your score. If your mail system cannot handle the size of your presentation files as an attachment, and you have absolutely no way to burn a CD or put your presentation onto a memory stick, then let me know and we'll work something out.
• You will use at least three references in assembling your presentation. At least one of the three references must be derived from a book or periodical rather than from the Web.
Every student in the group must present orally. You do not need to divide the time exactly equally. A group of four work this way:
1. The group leader introduces the topic (2 minutes)
2. Person #2 discusses one aspect of it (5 minutes)
3. Person #3 discusses a second aspect (7 minutes)
4. Person #4 discusses a third aspect that is the most important but the easiest to describe (4 minutes)
5. The group leader re-emerges to provide a wrap-up (2 minutes)

Recommendations:

Below are some general suggestions on how to pick topics and develop them.

• Pick a topic that is neither too broad nor too narrow. A topic that is too broad will leave you bewildered as to what to tell your fellow students and what to leave out. A topic that is too specific is unlikely to contain material that non-experts (i.e. your student audience) will understand, and you may have difficulty convincing your fellow students that the topic is important.
• Consult Scientific American if you want some ideas for topics. Articles in Sci Am are usually near the optimum for specificity--neither too specific nor too general.
• Here are some specific topics that have engendered good-quality presentations in the past:
  • The biology of sleep
  • Anthrax toxicity
  • String theory and subatomic particles
  • Hepatitis B
  • Water pollution
  • Attention-deficit disorder
  • Alzheimer's
  • Apoptosis
• Here are some topics that might make appropriate topics:
  • The physics of music
  • Buckminsterfullerene
  • Influenza vaccines
  • DDT and Malaria
  • Toxic Shock Syndrome
  • The Chernobyl disaster
  • Sickle-cell anemia and malaria
  • Lead toxicity

• Concentrate on explaining your topic clearly, even if that means you have to leave out some of the more entertaining aspects of your topic.
• Involve every member of your group in the process. Make sure each student in the group must take responsibility for a significant share of the work effort.
• Enjoy the presentation!