Posted on August 15, 2017 by Gabe Parmer
Senior design enables you to focus on your own project, and push your technical capabilities through it. However, it is very important to learn how to successfully communicate what you’re doing, and why it is cool with the outside world. Thus, a significant component of this class is learning and practicing the non-technical skills of writing and presentation.
An important aspect of Senior Design (SD) is gaining experience writing a document that holistically evaluates how your project relates to the world. This includes how the project should be presented to others, how it relates to the commercial and competitive landscape, and how it will impact the world. This document spells out the requirements for a series of writing assignments you must complete for SD.
For each of these writing assignments, make sure to follow the submission rules on the main SD webpage (i.e. use the google drive shared folder for the document and a pdf, and post the pdf on your github webpage). They should be submitted using the existing templates for writing1 through writing4 (do not rename files), and your pdf submission should be comparably named, but with a pdf extension.
The deadlines for each assignment is specified on the SD webpage with events labeled “SD DEADLINE: Writing …”.
Background: For this assignment you will write a short proposal for your senior design project. This will be modeled after the introductory summary page in a grant proposal made to the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research / Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program. This is a common way for small companies to get funding from the government to develop cutting edge products (like your senior design projects!).
You should convince the reader that your project solves an important problem, overcomes difficult technical challenges, and will improve the world in some way. The reader should feel that you understand the problem area and have some interesting ideas for solving the problem. Only then will they give you the money!
Assignment: You should do some background reading to find out what the requirements for an NSF summary page are. Since we are getting you ready for the real world, we are not going to give you detailed criteria for these assignments; you must learn to find out what you need to do on your own. Find the NSF call for proposals page that describes what they expect here. That document describes the entire proposal process–you just need to find the sections talking about the summary page. If you do not follow the NSF’s directions when you submit a proposal, it will be immediately rejected. Expect something similar for your assignment here…
To be clear, you only need to write the maximum 1 page Project Summary, not an entire 15 page NSF proposal!
Length and Format: 1 page, 11pt font, single spaced
For this assignment you must revise your summary page and write a ~1 page (11pt font, single spaced) elevator pitch. Check the NSF SBIR grant proposal call for what should be included in this pitch.
Important: You should leave the comments from your original summary page sections as is. For this part of the assignment you should copy/paste that content onto a new page lower down in the same google doc. Revise the 3 sections of the summary page as suggested by the TA, then add one more page with your elevator pitch. The pitch is likely to have similar content to your summary page, but you should not blatantly copy/paste the same sentences. Vary your wording to keep the reader interested, and make sure that your 1 page pitch is a nicely flowing narrative (not disjoint sections like the summary page).
Software costs money to make. If it isn’t going to make money back, or have a significant impact on the world, who will bother funding its development?
For this assignment you will continue your SBIR grant proposal to add two sections on the commercial opportunities related to your project and the impact it will have on society. As with the previous assignment, please start by copying the previous homework into the current assignment (with comments intact), update your content given the feedback from the writing TA, and proceed with the next section of your proposal.
We are diverging slightly from the standard NSF SBIR format for this assignment, but it is still a good idea to look through the call for proposals to see what kinds of things NSF cares about.
Length and Format: 3-4 pages, 11pt font, single spaced
Style: This is the one document that you need to make particularly compelling. If you were shopping a real business among venture capitalists, you’ll need to grab their attention - they see scores of business plans each day. Your writing should both have flair and yet be clear, and easy to read.
Important: Your writing should be a cohesive narrative, not just a list of bullet points or disconnected questions and answers!
Important: Make sure to use the writing3 document in your shared drive. You should paste in the content from your previous writing assignment at the top.
You should add two new sections to your proposal with content such as:
The Commercial Opportunity
Societal and Global Impact
Your new writing should be added to your existing document to make one cohesive proposal (summary page, elevator pitch, commercial / social impact). At this point only the new section will be reviewed by the grader, but you should keep updating the other parts of your document as your project evolves. Each section should have a clear heading.
For your final writing assignment you must pull all of the pieces together you’ve written thus far, and add a new section with a description of your solution.
Note that you have already written much of the necessary text in writing1, writing2, writing3, and design document 1. You should be sure to revise what you have written based on the writing TA’s comments.
Create a new document with all of the content below in your google folder and post a PDF version of your document to your web page in the gh-pages branch of your repository. Your file should be in 11pt font, single spaced. Use diagrams and graphs where appropriate.
Your grant should follow these guidelines (mostly copied from the call for proposals).
Project Summary [One (1) page MAXIMUM]. The Project Summary should be written in the third person, informative to other persons working in the same or related fields, and, insofar as possible, understandable to a scientifically or technically literate lay reader. It should not be an abstract of the proposal. Do not include proprietary information in the summary. Proposals that do not contain a complete Project Summary will not be accepted by FastLane or will be returned without review. The Project Summary is completed in FastLane by entering information into 3 text boxes; the aggregate of the 3 text boxes cannot exceed 4,600 characters (including spaces). Please note that the character count function of some word processors excludes hidden characters that WILL be counted by FastLane. Therefore, proposers may consider aiming for fewer characters (e.g., 4000) instead in order to avoid having to slim down the Project Summary later.
Overview and Key Words: Describe the potential outcome(s) of the proposed activity in terms of a product, process, or service. Provide a list of key words or phrases that identify the areas of technical expertise to be invoked in reviewing the proposal; and the areas of application that are the initial target of the technology.
Intellectual Merit: This section MUST begin with “This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project”. Address the intellectual merits of the proposed activity. Do not include proprietary information in the summary. Briefly describe the technical hurdle(s) that will addressed by the proposed R&D (which should be crucial to successful commercialization of the innovation), the goals of the proposed R&D, and a high-level summary of the plan to reach those goals.
Broader/Commercial Impact: In the short term, the proposed R&D activity is expected to bring the innovation closer to commercialization under a sustainable business model. In this box, describe the potential impacts on society that would be created by the commercialization of the innovation. Examples include generating larger economic impacts, meeting societal needs, and enabling further scientific / technological understanding.
Project Description. [Ten (10) pages MAXIMUM]. The project description is the core of the proposal document, where you convince the SBIR/STTR Program Director and the expert reviewers that your proposed R&D project meets the intellectual merit and broader/commercial impact criteria of the program. Present evidence that the proposed technology is innovative, that development of it entails high technical risk, and that you have a credible plan to establish technical feasibility during Phase I. Convince the reviewers that the company and the project team have the necessary expertise, resources, and support to carry out the project, and that they are committed to building a viable business around the product/service being developed. Finally, present a compelling case that the project objectives will significantly advance the readiness of the technology and strengthen and validate its commercial position. You do not need to use the precise section headings listed below, but it should be easy for a reviewer to find the relevant content. Although guidance is given regarding page lengths for each subsection, please remember that this section must be no more than 10 pages total!
Is there a broader societal need you are trying to address with this commercial opportunity? Please describe.
What is the broader societal need you are trying to address with this commercial opportunity?
Describe the key technical challenges and risks in bringing the innovation to market. Which of these will be your focus in the proposed Phase I project?
When working on teams, it is necessary that everyone is on the same page. Trello helps with the minutia of managing your week-to-week work, but it doesn’t give you a broad picture about what your project is all about, and how it will be implemented. It is necessary for everyone to understand the design in a larger team, so we will have you write some design documents!
First, you have to understand how the different team members will interact. In programs, this is what interfaces are used to communicate between each member’s code. In this assignment, you’ll dive into your interface specifications!
Once you have your interfaces, and understand how team members are both decoupled, and how they interact, it is time to document the entire high-level design of your project. Get ready for drawing some circles, squares, and lines between them! This assignment has you providing the high-level design that holds all of your code together.
It isn’t enough to technically complete your project. You also need to sell it! Presentation skills are very important and relatively rare in graduating undergrads. Thus much of SD will focus on your presentation skills.
Don’t forget to submit your presentations via google docs, and on your webpage.
This presentation will focus on the elevator pitch for your project. Imagine you have three minutes with someone, and your goals are to have them understand 1. what the project is, 1. why it is important, 1. that it is possible, and 1. your general approach.
You should prepare a six minute business proposal. Your goal is to convince us that what you are building is a great idea and that you have some structure in mind to make it a reality. The intended audience is a room full of tech-savvy venture capitalists (if your idea is marketable), a Dean (if it has academic value), and heads of philanthropic organizations (if it focuses on social good). They don’t know how to program, but they’ve been funding projects for the last ten years and know the basic lingo. Convince us that you’ve got a million dollar idea!
Presentation Length: 6 minutes. Intended Audience: Tech-savy VCs, a Dean, philanthropic leaders
Describe the overall architecture of your project. Start with a brief overview of the system goals, then give a technical description of what the key components are, what types of technologies/libraries you will make use of, and how the pieces will interact.
Put particular effort into having a nice visual that helps us understand the components of your system.
Please briefly remind everyone of the motivation and context for your project
Length: 6 minutes. Audience: The technical team you lead at a company.
From now on, all the presentations you do will be practice for your final end of semester talk. You will have several chances to iterate on the presentation and improve on it.
This presentation should introduce your project to the audience, describe some of the technical challenges you’ve been working on, and include some form of demo that illustrates your work. The presentation should aim to excite the audience about what you’ve been working on so that they will invest in your company or buy your product once you are done.
Your presentation should include both slides and an actual demo. The demo portion can either be live or video recorded. Screen shots are OK, but that usually is not very exciting to watch. The demo can (and if possible, should) be smoothly interleaved with the rest of your presentation. Until you actually have the final demo, you might have some stand-in slides describing the demo.
The goal of this presentation is for it to feel like an Apple product release conference. The audience should be excited about how your product will change their world, impressed by your technical achievements, and should come away with a clear idea of what it will do. You should assume the audience does not know anything about your product yet, so you must introduce it to them and convince them it solves an important problem. You should assume the audience is moderately technical, so they will understand if you go into reasonable depth about how your project is built. That said, you should not be showing us raw code. Nobody wants to see your curly braces.
You will be graded based on your adherence to the “seven things”, the visual quality of your presentation, and its content. You should be sure to look at the google doc shared with you about the presentation skills you need to work on!
Length: 8 minutes
Audience: tech-savy, but non-programmer crowd (think SEAS student in another department)
For advice on what is required, and some resources to watch as examples, please see this presentation from Prof. Wood.
This is the first time that you’re giving a version of the FINAL presentation of your project. Get used to it. This is your semester.
You want to sell the work. You want to properly motivate it. You want to give some insight into the difficult technical aspects, while also making them accessible (no small feat!). You want the audience to understand, but you also want them to understand why what you’ve done is impressive.
Practice your final presentation one more time! Same constraints, and you must take the feedback into account from the previous iteration.
We expect this to be perfect by now. This is your last chance for feedback before the actual final presentation! Take it seriously. You must take the feedback into account from the previous iteration.
Note that most of this content is adapted from Prof. Wood’s version of this course from 2016.