CS115 Term Project
PM5: Presentation
Short summary: In this milestone, you will be presenting
your website to your peers, as well as upload your completed website.
Table of Contents
- Overview and goals
- Submission guidelines
- Presentation
- Website
- Feedback and grading
Overview and Goals
Your learning journey in this class is approaching the finish line.
As part of this milestone,
you will be presenting to your peers the website you have
been developing during the term, highlighting the best of your work.
You will create a short screencast of your website (between 3-5 minutes),
which you will upload either to YouTube or Zoom. We will watch
the videos together in class and give feedback to one another.
Submission Guidelines
In this milestone, your output will include the following components:
- A link to a video of your recorded presentation.
- A link to your project website, which your peers can visit
during your presentation.
You will submit both links using this Google form.
We will use the timestamp of your submission to establish the
order of presentations.
Presentation
Here is some general guidance for preparing your presentation (which you will
record via screencasting):
- You will have between 3-5 minutes to highlight both the content
and design choices of your website.
- Content: Tell us about your guiding research questions,
and then proceed to show the website content and explain how
the content addresses your research questions.
- Design Choices: Explain your various design choices
and tie them to your overall goal with this website. For example,
if your background contains images, explain why that is appropriate and
the relation of those images to the website content. If your content
is organized in multiple columns, explain why you decided for that layout.
If your content is mostly text, why is that better than a combination of
various content elements (such as images, infographics, tables, etc.)
- Stay within your 5-minute time limit, this way, all students will
get a chance to watch their presentation.
It's probably a good idea to write down your script and rehearse
it to measure how long it takes. Once you have it under five minutes
then use a software such as QuickTime Player (on Mac) or
Screencast-O-Matic (all platforms) to record yourself while doing the
presentation.
It is also possible to use Zoom to record your presentation to
the cloud.
Here are some examples of screencasts created by students in Spring 2021 T3:
Peer Feedback
Your peers know how hard you have worked on this project and can appreciate
all the learning that has happened in the past weeks, since they went through
the same process. In class, we will make available a Google
Form for you to provide feedback to your peers during and after each presentation.
The input fields will be the following:
a) Share one thing you loved about the presentation;
b) Share one thing you loved about the website;
c) What can be still improved?
All students are expected to provide feedback to their peers. The feedback will then be anonimized (the column of email addresses will be deleted) and it will be shared with students to help them make improvement to their code before the final deadline.
Website
General Advice about the Website
- Your website landing page will be pm5_final.html.
- Add the prefix pm5 to all other HTML pages that are part
of the final version. Remember,
you will not change files from pm4, pm3, etc.
- References: there are two alternatives. You can decide to create a new
page using the layout of the final website that lists all references that
you used for your project. Alternatively, you may make a copy of PM1's references,
name it pm5_references.html, and update it to list the final
references that made it to your final version by removing or adding references.
You will then put a link to pm5_references.html,
in a footer at the end of your starting page.
- Other information such as your name, date, course name, etc, should go
in this footer too.
- In your text, include links to cite the work of others by linking to their
page.
- If you are including images from other websites, make sure the images
are not protected by copyright. If they are in the public domain, acknowledge
and give credit to the creator by linking to their page.
- Avoid walls of text. Break your content into chunks with subtitles, images,
lines, etc. Think of other visual and design elements that might facilitate
content absorption.
- Make it easy for the visitors to understand what your website has to offer.
- Check out how your website looks on a mobile phone, since many people will
access it via phone. You want to avoid big surprises.
- Don't forget to apply the good coding practices you have learned: comments,
indentation, line length, validation of pages, etc.
Upload the Website
During class presentation, all students should have access to your website.
You will create a folder pm5 and put all your content there.
However, all students have time until May 28 to continue making improvement
on the website (strengthen the writing and fix any spelling mistakes,
fix validation errors, comment the code
and give attributions, etc. That means that you can continue updating and uploading
the pages in this folder until the final deadline.
Make sure that all relative links are working properly.
Do not affect the work you have done in your previous milestones.
The URL that you'll be sharing with the class should be something like:
http://cs.wellesley.edu/~USER/cs115-project/pm5/pm5_final.html.
Feedback and Grading
This milestone is split in two parts in terms of grading:
a) you'll get 4 points for the video presentation; and b)
you'll get 12 points spread out in four areas: feedback to peers (1 point),
content of website (5 points);
coding of website (5 points), final reflection (1 point).
Presentation
- You gave a compelling video presentation doing your best to
showcase both the research and design work that went into
creating the website.
- Your video presentation stayed within the alloted time.
Content
- The research questions that motivated the research are
clearly summarized and shape the content of the website.
- You have made good use of the literature you consulted for
the project and cited it properly.
- Your writing is concise and informational, taking the user
into a journey of learning more about the topic.
- Your website makes it easy for the content to be accessed
(e.g., there is no long, uninterrupted text, there are many
graphics that convey content too, etc.)
- You have incorporated feedback from earlier milestones.
Coding
- Your code shows your mastery of HTML and CSS, by creating
a visually compelling website.
- Your website conveys modern web design (not stuck in the early 00's).
- Both HTML and CSS are valid according to W3 validators.
- You have challenged yourself to create a "look-and-feel" for the
website that fits well with the theme of your research.
- You have given credit (in comments) to images, code, etc., to
material that you found on the web.
Back to table of contents
Project Milestones Overview
Project Milestone 1 (PM1)
Project Milestone 2 (PM2)
Project Milestone 3 (PM3)
Project Milestone 4 (PM4)
Back to CS 115 website