🖼️ Slides and scripts

Each week, you’ll make a slide that summarizes the lecture and a slide that summarizes the reading. You’ll also revise the previous week’s two slides. Each slide will be accompanied by a short “script” with the language you would use to present the slide in no more than a minute.

This page outlines the purpose of this assignment, and tips for making effective slides and scripts.

😴 Motivation

Industry and academia produce a firehose of slide deck presentations. With the noble goal of preparing students for the real world, instructors often ask students to prepare and present slide decks. But, the vast majority of slide decks from new grads (and not-so-new grads!) are ineffective. What gives?

Here are some reasons why I think bad slide decks are so pervasive:

Students often present once at the end of the course, so there is rarely an opportunity for iterative improvement.
Students are not incentivized to incorporate feedback after the course is over, and there are often many enrolled students, so instructors are not incentivized to provide detailed feedback.
Few students are paying attention to other students’ presentations, often because there is no incentive to pay attention. So, lots of time spent on in-class presentations ends up wasted.

I think we can break this vicious cycle!

The goal of the slide+script assignment is to approximate the act of preparing a thoughtful presentation, receiving detailed feedback, and iterating based on feedback, without actually requiring everyone to give an in-class presentation each week.

🚀 Tips for slides and scripts

Some tips for making good slides and scripts are below. These tips are by no means hard-and-fast rules, just suggestions.

As the quarter progresses, this list may grow!

Your slide should not summarize the entire lecture or paper. Instead, focus on one or more aspects you found interesting.
Your intended audience should be an interested undergraduate who has completed the pre-reqs for this course, but has not taken the course.
Avoid making text-heavy slides. Think of your slide as a visual aid to what you’re saying out loud. Your audience should be listening to you speak (i.e., hearing your script) rather than reading your slide.
Sometimes, slide text is unavoidable. In-text images (e.g., unicode) can make text feel less heavy, but use sparingly. You can search and copy unicode directly from this website: unicode.party
The script is not an academic essay. Use the same language you would say out loud. Consider reading your script out loud, and time how long it takes to read at a relaxed pace. Brevity is valued!
A custom graphic or flow chart can make for an excellent slide. draw.io is a free tool for making flow charts. If you know of other free tools, let me know!
While not ideal, if you need an extra slide to fully explain your thoughts, feel free. That being said, one of the goals of this assignment is to practice being brief, clear, and concise.
At the end of the course, you’ll have a polished repository of the key takeaways. Keep your future self in mind while creating slides. What might be useful a year or more down the road?
If you choose to show a plot, it’s generally a good idea to do the following before sharing the punchline: briefly say what the points/lines/etc. represent, describe the x-axis, describe the y-axis, and interpret one specific point/line/etc. on the plot. These steps are often skipped!
Make sure to zoom in as much as possible before taking screenshots. This ensures your images won’t look grainy.
Make sure your plots are big enough. The audience should not have to strain to read the axis labels.
The free Paintbrush app for Mac is great for simple image editing (e.g., moving around labels on plots). This is nice for customizing screenshotted paper plots.
When possible, slide titles should read more like newspaper headlines than just a statement of the slide content. For example, “Threshold test suggests bias” is better than “Threshold test results”.
There’s no need to reference the existence of the class in your slides or scripts. For example, avoid titles like “Week 1 slides”.
For more serious topics, I would avoid using images that could be perceived as minimizing the significance of the subject (e.g., be sparing with cartoons).
Light text a dark background tends to be hard to read. See this post for more details.