Final Report, Presentation, and Demonstration

Please check the Course schedule for due dates of various parts of the assignment.

The final products for the team project include a written report, a presentation, a short video, and a completed piece of software.

Final Project Report

Your final report is a summation of all the work that you have accomplished over the course of the semester. It should act as a standalone document. As a result, you may draw heavily from your previous reports in the class, including your system design and your progress reports. It is okay to duplicate information from those reports as long as it is updated, accurate, and professional in quality.

A report of at least 7-10 pages that should include the following:

  • Overview / Introduction
    • An overview of the motivation behind your project
      • What is the problem? Who is the client? Why is it hard/interesting?
    • An overview of your solution
  • Project Description
    • What are the major features / use cases?
    • This section should be picture-heavy to give readers a sense of of the user-facing functionality. Link to the demo video that you created (see below).
  • System Design
    • This section may draw heavily on your system design doc (although make sure it is updated!)
    • You should have an image that gives an overview of the system design.
    • Describe your system design, being sure to reference the components in your image.
  • Team Processes
    • This section should draw heavily from your progress reports.
    • What team processes did you use and what were your roles?
    • Make sure to include images where appropriate - of the mechanisms you used to keep track of tasks (ex: Trello), as well as your burndown chart.
    • Reflection: What worked or didn’t work about your processes for this project? What might you change if you would do it again?
  • Conclusion
    • Given more time, what are ways that your application could be improved (if any)?
    • A good wrap-up paragraph or two that summarizes your project and your team process.

This is your final product and it should reflect the professional style and structure that we have been shooting for over the course of this semester! We would strongly encourage you to use a professional report template such as the Overleaf template if you use LaTeX, or the Papers and Reports template for Microsoft Word. We will also allow a web-based format if you would like to develop it for showing off to future employers (for example, Wordpress or Medium). However, We will maintain the same styling expectations.

Team Presentation

The team presentation should aim at faculty and students who have sufficient computing experiences. The presentation should contain the following points and should be no more than 15 minutes.

  • What is the problem?: An overview of your problem
  • What is your answer?: An overview of your solution (how it meets your clients needs)
  • Showing your solution: A demo of your solution (or you could play your demo video!)
  • How did you build it?: An overview of your technical infrastructure
  • How did your development processes contribute towards your goal?: A reflection on how your team processes worked and/or didn’t work to produce high quality

Final Demo Video

Demo videos have the potential to last far longer than working demos. In that spirit, you should have a demo video that that demonstrates the core interactions of your interface. By the end of the video, it should be clear what the primary functions of your app are.

What is a good video?

Good videos have good visuals and good sound. The advice seems obvious, but the number of submissions that We see every year with blurry input and the soundscape of a wind tunnel tells me that these ideas need to be reinforced.

Decide whether you want to use music, captions, narrative or some kind of combination of them. For the love of god, don’t create a silent demo video. Below, you’ll find some nice resources for music that you can include as a backdrop to your product.

Good Examples:

Somewhere in your design post, a demo video should be embedded that shows interaction with your final project.

Multimedia for your Videos

Since our intention is to be able to broadly share these videos, it is important that we take into account copyright considerations. Fortunately, Bucknell has compiled a wonderful list of resources that should provide you with a vast library of sound, video, and images to accompany your videos and make them look as professional as possible.

  • Bucknell’s Music and Sound resources: In particular, We would recommend the AudioBlocks link on this site, which Bucknell has a license for. We have found it to be a great resources for everything from sound effects to background music.
  • Bucknell’s Video Resources: Similar to AudioBlocks, VideoBlocks will allow you to download snippets of video that you can freely use in your own movies (if needed).

Recording your Video

Your video should be as high quality as possible. For many of your screen-based products, you’ll want some kind of screen-capturing software.

  • Zoom: You can obviously use Zoom to record the video.
  • On Linux: OBS Screen Recorder is one of the featured rich and advanced screencasting program for Linux. This streaming software let you do real-time source and device capture, recording and broadcasting, encoding, and scene composition.
  • On Mac: QuickTime has built-in screen capture software that will record any activity on the screen. There are other options, but this is likely the most simple.
  • On Windows: There are a number of free options on Windows - many of which can be explored in this article

Video Editors

You’ll also need a decent video editor to put together sight and sound.

Deliverables

All deliverables should be submitted through our Google Classroom.

  • A Google Doc of your written report
  • A Google Slides or PPT or your final presentation
  • Final project source code in a zip format, generated from your repository.
  • 1-3 minute demo video. In addition, the video should be uploaded to an accessible platform (YouTube, Vimeo link).
  • PDF of the AIECode Final Project Review
  • A README that includes:
    • A video link to your demo from an accessible platform (YouTube, Vimeo). If you are uncomfortable with publicizing your product, you may generate a private link that the instructors can access.
    • A link to your repository (The instructors should have permission to at least view it).