A Philosophy for Group Project Presentations

My Goal (and thus your goal) for Group Projects.

The general idea behind the group project is to extend the concepts described in MY3110 to specific materials processing problems not considered in class. For example, previous years have seen group projects discuss

1. Electromagnetic stirring of liquid metal melts during solidification.
2. Using IDEAS to solve for heat flow in a complex shape.
3. Extrusion of polymer melts into ceramic fiber weaves.
4. Heat and fluid flow in complex casting geometries.
5. CVD of diamond-like films.
6. Properties of nano-particulate fluids.
7. Fluid/mass transport during electro-deposition.
8. Powder processing with a bimodal particle size.

My goal for the group projects is to incorporate multiple concepts from the course to create a process description that reinforces the mass/energy transfer ideas described in class.

Group Project Evaluation.

Grading of the group projects will be equally split between the written technical report of the project and the oral presentation of the project results. The technical report will include the problem statement, the proposed approach, the calculations used in analyzing the processing problem and a summary of the results. In many cases, you may be trying to develop a process model and how this is related to microstructure and/or properties. In general, the more transport concepts correctly and coherently applied to the processing problem, the better the evaluation. Any originality displayed in the project should be highlighted in the technical report and will be heavily weighted in your favor. The comments and equation detail in the equation/calculation section should be sufficient to allow a fellow 3110 student to reproduce your results.

The group project presentations will be 20 minutes long. Within this time period, your objective should be to communicate the most important aspects of a process model in a way that allows the audience to understand the physical basis of your model, what the most critical parameters are, and how the process parameters are correlated with the microstructure and/or properties and/or process efficiency. To achieve success in this endeavor requires good technical content, some planning, and practice. Having good technical content is usually achieved through thoughtful consideration of the problem, examining multiple approaches and making use of outside expertise, such as reading the technical literature and asking other ‘experts’. Developing technical content in this manner requires both time and effort, so do not wait until the ‘last minute’ to begin making progress. The level of detail in the technical approach that is presented must be such that a student in 3110 understands which equations and concepts are used to achieve specific outcomes to the point where they could reproduce your results. You should not be averse to showing the equations used and how they are applied to the specific problem. However, your presentation may become tedious if every step of the derivation is examined. It is up to you to find the compromise between the mathematical detail required to understand the process/design and equation overload.

Having good technical content is only a partial success. Inability to present your results in a coherent fashion can negate the effectiveness of your development efforts. Planning a 20 minute presentation should begin with the realization that the maximum rate of slides/time that can be effectively used in human communication is about 1 slide/minute (20 slides total). A higher rate than 1 slide/minute will most likely drown your audience in a flood of information. You should also consider that it is necessary that you make all the important connections between concepts and talking points for the audience as things that are obvious to you, now an expert, are not so obvious to people seeing the ideas for the first time (this is always a problem for professors, too). Probably the best way to achieve an effective presentation is to first determine the main message you wish to communicate, then outline your presentation while making sure that the ‘message’ remains intact, then develop slides consistent with the outline and ‘message’, AND THEN PRACTICE. The importance of prior verbalization of the entire presentation cannot be over estimated. So, I am begging and pleading with you to please practice your talk as a group prior to presenting it to your peers. A practice presentation ‘dress rehearsal’ is one of the main ways that you can judge whether or not the message is coherent and rational.