For Career Day, you're required to prepare a 2-minute presentation that introduces yourself and demonstrates some of your work on your Breakable Toy. The presentation will be accompanied by a screencast that will play in the background as you speak (details on that will be coming early in Week 9).
Make sure you definitely do the following things (in whatever order you think is best):
- Greet the audience
- Intro your background
- Bullet point your prior career and/or educational experience
- Cite how you got started in programming
The following are optional, maybe-good-things to put in:
- A cool, attention-grabbing opening line that isn't "Hi, I'm #{so-and-so}". (If you choose to take this approach, make sure to introduce yourself a couple sentences later.)
- Some sort of personal, memorable little story about something relevant (i.e. how you got into programming in story form)
Talk about your breakable toy and, if possible, one other project you worked on. More time should be spent talking about your breakable toy than any other project. During this time, consider the following points:
- Your description should be a mix of non-technical (i.e., features) and technical. Don't spend the majority of your time describing features.
- Make sure to mention any specific technologies you worked with outside the basics - i.e. APIs or javascript libraries
- Think about addressing a specific challenge you ran into during the project, and how you got past it
Wrap up your talk by bringing it back to yourself and talking about what you're looking for going forward. If you have a specific industry you want to work in, mention it here. If not, talk about what gets you excited about working in the field, what you're looking for in a job/workplace, etc.
Practice your presentation 3-5 times.
- Plan out a line-by-line summary of the sentence structure for the first half of your presentation. This should be a bullet-point summary of what you want to say in each sentence - you shouldn't be memorizing words, but you should be memorizing the general structure of your presentation.
- Come in with a notecard with that sentence structure if you need it for reference
- For the second half of your presentation (the part about your projects), imagine that you're at the end of week 10 with a finished breakable toy, and talk about what that imaginary finished project looks like. Feel free to make things up; this section will change later, but it's important to get comfortable figuring how you'll introduce your app.
- Plan out a conclusion to your talk
Work on getting comfortable with your presentation, work on getting it down without a notecard.
Be ready to present without a notecard.