EECS 398, 399: Senior Project I, II

Oral Project Status Reports

There will be two oral project status reports meetings held during the semester. These reports are intended to develop your communications skills and reflect the latest trend in engineering towards very short Power Point presentations to supervisors and administrators. Your presentation will be to the entiore class and your goal will be to make them knowledgeable about your project and its current status. These project status reports will be no more than eight minutes in duration. Each team will sign up for a specific time — instructions on how to sign up for these meetings will be given later in the semester

Oral Status Report Format:

Each team will be responsible for preparing their status report using PowerPoint. This presentation will be due the day before the actual presentation by e-mail. Although the plan is to pre-load the White 411 computer with the presentations each team should come prepared with their presentation on a CD as a back-up. It is not expected that every team member will participate in both status reports, but each team member should participate in one.

A specific template (e.g., a Case School of Engineering template) should be used for your presentations. The content of this presentation shall be the following:


1. The first slide should give the name of the project, the names of the team members, and the names of sponsors and technical advisors.
   
2. The second slide should describe the project. This slide may contain drawings, pictures, video, etc. as appropriate. Digital cameras, digitizers, and camcorders are available upon request.
   
3. The third slide should describe your technical accomplishments to date. Again, this slide may contain drawings, pictures and other materials as appropriate. At this time of the semester this can highlight your literature research results, tables of parts you are looking at, and any modeling or engineering calculations you are doing.
   
4. The fourth slide should present your management plan in a suitable, updatable format. You should use this slide to point out where you are, any deviations from schedule, and describe your upcoming project tasks.Specifically, what was planned to occur, what actually happened, what work arounds were put in place to get the project back on schedule, and were there any problems large enough to threaten project completion.
   
A general rule of thumb for technical presentations is that (on the average) it takes two minutes to present a Power Point slide; hence, four slides.

Quad Chart:

There is one additional slide required for the second status report — a quad chart. This will be the fifth slide of your presentation and will be briefly presented at the end of your status report. Quad charts are being used in academia, industry and government as a Power Point equivalent of an Executive Summary. It is one slide organized into four quadrants; hence, it is called a quad chart.

A specific template (e.g., a Case School of Engineering template) should be used for this quad chart. The contents of this slide shall be the following:

1. The upper left quadrant (rectangle) should give the name of the project, the names of the team members, and the names of sponsors and technical advisors.
   
2. The upper right quadrant should give the title of the project and, in a few bullets, describe the project.
   
3. The lower left quadrant slide should describe your technical accomplishments to date.
   
4. The lower right quadrant may be anything which helps to explain your project. Typically, you put drawings, artwork, pictures, etc. in this quadrant.

Here are some examples of quad charts used by EECS faculty member to explain their research. (PDF, 280 kB)


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