The first of the instructor meetings will be focused on presenting and discussing the outcomes of the planning, designing, and setup iteration (Milestone 0). Key goals of the meeting are (1) enhancing the instructor’s understanding of your project, and (2) giving the instructor an opportunity to provide feedback to the team.
The instructor meeting will be 25 minutes long and roughly structured as follows:
Because the team meetings are scheduled back to back, time management will be an important concern, and meetings will generally not be permitted to run long.
This part of the meeting is mainly concerned with answering the question:
What system are you going to build?
To ensure that you present this part effectively, you must follow these criteria:
Focus on the user. For the explanation of your system to be compelling, the instructor must understand the mind of the user. What is the user’s context/background? What are their goals in using the system?
Focus on the UI. Similar to the user focus, the presentation should focus on the user’s view of the system – namely, the user interface (and your sketches thereof).
Focus on interesting user tasks. Some tasks are more central to your system’s value or goals than others. Given the limited presentation time available, you should focus on those tasks which are more interesting or fundamental to your system.
Avoid getting lost in the button clicks. Feature presentations that devolve into “this button does this, that button does that” tend to lose sight of what’s really important. Thus, when button clicks are explained, it should always clearly be in the service of a higher-level user task or goal.
Don’t step through the list of requirements. The requirements should implicitly become clear through your user-centered presentation of the UI. There is no need to go through your list of requirements.
This part of the meeting is mainly concerned with answering the question:
How are you going to build the system?
“How” in this case refers both to what (internal) design you will use and to what process your team will follow. Here are a few guidelines for you to follow in presenting this part:
Budget time carefully. There is only limited time for this part. Thus, you will not be able to present each part in detail. Some parts, which are of low risk or low interest, may be presented with only one or two lines before moving on.
Emphasize the interesting. Given the limited time, you will want to spend more time on the parts of the design/plan that are interesting. “Interesting” in this case generally means that the parts are tricky, risky, clever, or unusual.
This part of the meeting is mainly concerned with giving the instructors an opportunity to provide you with feedback or advice. You should prepare questions to ask the instructor, and prioritize the questions to ensure that the most important ones get covered. The instructor may also want to raise concerns based on the presentation or his review of the plan, so be prepared to accommodate instructor-led discussion as well.
One (and only one) team member should play the role of meeting leader. This person should present the first two parts of the meeting, and act as facilitator during the discussion part. In performing this role, the meeting leader should follow these criteria:
Be organized and prepared. The leader may use slides and should have well thought out talking points.
Be clear. Make sure to explain thoroughly anything the instructors might not know. (Assume that the instructors know very little for the purposes of this presentation.) Also, make sure the audience is always clear about (1) why the material being presented is important and (2) where the talk is going.
In selecting the meeting leader, the team must rotate presenters such that each team member serves at least once as instructor meeting leader or interactive demo booth operator.
Note that there is an A&B reward for serving as instructor meeting leader. See the Above and Beyond Points document for details.