ECOI

Notes from Beta Presentation

Alan Turing as a computer scientist that doesn't fit the mold. Using him may not be what we want since we were talking about using people who are still alive.

People really liked sorting cards as the interactive part. One suggestion that I particularly liked was that we demo the sort using a horribly inefficient algorithm and let the group(s) loose with, "can you do better than us?"

Another suggestion for the interactive section is hand out pringles and get the group to attempt to make them fly. The idea here is that our interactive part should have a more direct tie-in with other parts of the presentation. I'm not sure how practical this idea really is, but more ideas are always nice.

We need to be careful with our idea to ask the question, "How many computers do you have {on you; in your home}?" In some cases schools don't allow cell-phones, etc in class, and in other cases the people in the group aren't in a position to have a computer -- in the traditional sense of the term.

We used, on a whim, some personal and exciting stories to relay our information. A number of people in the grouped liked that and suggested we use more. I think they were referring to our stories about Pringles, Boeing, and any of the others we thought of (I can't remember them right now).

Something I noted, and this is more of a public speaking thing in general than it is a presentation specific thing, but, we all talked quite fast. This probably wasn't picked up on by a full group of people who know exactly what we were talking about, but for a group of high-schoolers/adults who have never had experience in computer science, if we start going on about these things as quickly as we were, we're not going to get very good results. Part of this may have been because we were under a huge time constraint, so it may be a moot point, but I thought I should bring it up.

Pros
- Open source software
- Mac and PC compatible application
- Portable software can be run from flash drive (software install on computer not required)
- Smart, radio based remotes
- Presentation of questions and tallying of results are independent functions (allows for unscripted questions)
- Questions can be scripted through a CSV file if desired
Cons
- Visual Basic (PC version of app) and REALbasic (Mac version of app) are proprietary programming languages and require a license purchase
- Using a CSV question list requires a hardcoded filename
- No *nix support