a presentation experience on last friday

A concrete activity:

I had a very special presentation experience on the last Friday morning. The presentation was given to a group of girls aged around 10 I believe. In the presentation, we (an undergraduate student from School of Informatics and I) planned to briefly introduce ourselves first; then one of us was going to ask them the question about that what kind of people they think we are as people in computing (here we thought we would get some answers such as nerdy looking, with big glasses, etc.); then we would present our questions (such as how does this person making his living or who is a computer scientists, those kids pick one from four photos) to them, and they could choose answers by using their remote handlers; after these questions, we planed to give them some project examples for what we do in computing. We have 16 slides and 9 questions, and for each questions, there are two screens, one is for the question, and another one provides the statistical result of the answers they chose.

Looking back at the phenomenon in the presentation process by using those theories we learned on classes:

We got a plan and practiced for around half hour together in that morning. The process was rationalized based on time. We predicted their answers for our question and made the different parts pf the presentation connected based their answers—our expectations from them. We supposed to get a nerdy figure our of their mind and show them that we are ordinary people just like other people, and you never separate them from others by looking their face and photos. However, those kids were not very cooperative. They told us people in computing are just usual people like us. They have already known the answers before we “convince” them! Related with HCI, this means the real context. We think we know what will happen in a certain context. But we never know before we actually observe the activities truly happened in real context. We share the same horizons about people in computing with those kids, but our horizons about who those kids are have some problems. Maybe this is one of those unexpected results of the artifact world. By surfing on the Internet, they can easily know these simple questions.

They showed their childish characters when they interacted with those questions though. For example, there is a question: what is this person’s profession? And we show "spiderman's" picture on the right side of the slide, on which he has his camera in his hand.


The options are:

A. Photographer
B. Actor
C. Computer Scientist
D. Super Hero

They chose all of these four answers even they were exciting at the time they saw this question and claimed that they know him.

They need to point at the adapter by using their handler when they chose their answer. However, they tended to point their handlers to the screen where the question was shown. When this happened, another presenter had to hold the adopter and reminded those kids that they have to point at it in order to get their answer calculated.

Here I got a point about “breakdown”: it could be very small thing and maybe totally unexpected. We found that those small girls could not understand the meaning of “profession”, their confusing made us very uneasy, and we have to change it into ”make a living with”.

In the whole presenting process, a lot of judgment was made to direct the process based on what was happening -- embodiment. We have several really cool and interesting examples about Music Informatics and Virtual Reality. But we cut them down because we were run out of time. Those girls were educated hopefully. They were very energetic and involved. In order to let them get the meanings of the presentation, we say it clearly that why are ask those questions and give those examples. They are not just for fun or cool feelings. We use them as media to show that we could do a lot of things such as game design and music control rather than just coding. We use a very simple sudoku game to show those girls that not all the logics are unsolvable or as abstract as E=mc2.

After this presentation was done, I did reflection-on-action, and new knowledge about presentation was gained. Such as, presentation could be interactive activities rather than lecture style. Also my experience of living in the US therefore horizons were enriched in someway both consciously and unconsciously.

An interesting question I asked myself is who could we use these philosophy theories interpret people’s unconscious behaviors? People’s unconscious behavior is highly context related, isn’t it?