Objectives:
- To encourage students to think of research communication as story telling.
- To understand the difficulty of abiding by time-constraints and in making their talks accessible to general audiences.
Pre-class work
- Read: Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling. Answer: What can Pixar teach you about communicating your research?
- Prepare a 5-min presentation (with slides) about your current research project, or a project you’ve worked on before, following the instructions below. You will get feedback from your peers on this presentation in class.
Insight: We’ve previously noticed that for this first class on communication, students trust their own instincts over the instructions we provide them. After practicing in class, students better incorporate the “best practices” for preparing talks for a general audiences. This is why we have two sessions on the topic.
In class [slides]
- [10min] Students socialize
- [5min] Introduction:
- Why is communicating research important? What makes it difficult?
- Share personal story about struggling with communication, and normalize the struggle inherent in developing good communication practices.
- [10min] What can Pixar can teach about communicating research?
- [15min] Example of bad presentation. As a group: What went wrong?
- [15min] Example of good presentation. As a group: What changed?
- [30min] Practice presenting in groups of 3: 5min per presentation + 5min for feedback, repeated 3 times. For the feedback phase, ask the student who just presented to first discuss what they think went well and what could have gone better.
- [30min] As a group: What was hard? What worked well? How will you improve your presentation for next week?
- [5min] In-class survey: What did you take away from class today?
Instructions for preparing your 5-min talk
Note: Parts of this prompt have been adapted from Lillie Pentacost’s Science in the News Orientation slides.
Many times in your professional trajectory, you will find it important to be able to present complex ideas in a way that is exciting, clear, and convincing. This week, we will be practicing exactly how to do this!
In this week’s class, you will each give a 5-minute talk (with slides) about one of the following:
- A research project you’re currently working on
- A research project you’ve previously worked on
- A paper you like
For this talk, you will assume a general audience that has some (but not a lot of) familiarity with computer science. For example, imagine you’re giving this talk to first-year college students interested in studying computer science.
Structure: In talks you attended by your fellow computer scientists (or talks that you give to your fellow scientists), you will find that the most common structure is:
- Background
- Problem statement + importance
- Your contribution
- Supporting details
- Implications
- Results/conclusion
However, for a general audience, it is best to structure your talk as follows:
- High-level background
- Problem statement + importance – keep this at a very high level; why does this matter to society, for example?
- Punch line (results / conclusion)
- So what? (implications of your contribution)
- Supporting details
Jargon: Avoid using jargon that’s not necessary, and define the jargon that you do use!
Additional tips:
- Use pictures to convey your story (as opposed to slides full of text)
- Put each slide’s take-away in its title
- Use a consistent color scheme and arrows and textboxes to highlight where you want the audience to look in the slide