Tips for a technical presentation

Recently, I had to give an introductory tutorial on debugging techniques for the Fundamentals of Computing class at the University of Notre Dame.

Around this time, I was reading Dale Carnegie's best-seller on public speaking and I decided this tutorial session was an opportunity to apply some of the methods discussed in the book.

I planned on using a powerpoint-style presentation that I had found to be useful and effective for such technical talks and presentations. The link to the pdf of the presentation is here.

Here are the methods from the book that I incorporated in the presentation, and how I found them to be beneficial:
  
1. Visualize: Using pictures in my presentation offered several benefits. The key ones were:

• It made it easier to relate the key points in the talk to normal occurrences and actions in our daily lives.
• It made it easier to keep the audience engaged. I have realized nothing grabs the mind's attention than a picture that draws eyes to it.
• It allowed me to invoke certain thoughts and feelings in the audience's mind. For example, a well formatted program is easy to search, move around, add new items, throw out old and obsolete items, and show it to your peers. Just like a well organized closet shown in the talk slides above!
• It allowed me to weave a story and add some anecdotes around some of the key points in the presentation. Like, how the construction of Sydney Opera House was begun before all the designs and details were finalized, leading to extreme cost overruns and delays (which illustrated the perils of starting without a design or blueprint).

2. Relate to audience: I never really understood the importance of this until I listened to a lawyer speaking to a group of software engineers. I noticed how he had the attention of everyone in the room for the entire hour. The reason - he was using processes and concepts common in the engineering field as analogies to explain laws and legal practices!

Here is what I did and found to be helpful in my presentation:

• My audience was comprised of young, eager to explore the world, fun, sports-loving bunch that grew up watching The Simpsons. So I had pictures that either looked familiar or appealed to their interests and sensitivities.

3. Use examples: My colleague recently shared a study that showed how practice is necessary for learning facts and, on the other hand, worked examples for learning skills. This was especially important in my talk since debugging is a skill that is essential to becoming a good software engineer.

I incorporated examples throughout my presentation by:

• Having sample programs and code illustrated in the slides where possible to describe the techniques being discussed.
• Having links to sample programs that the audience can download, run, and debug using the tools and techniques described in the presentation. I used the last 10 minutes of my presentation to have them run a sample program and use some of the described tools to identify and fix its errors.

In the end, it was not only my audience who learned something new! I had learned and understood the effectiveness of these above methods in speaking to an audience and engaging them in a technical presentation.