Micro-Credentialing Badge
Creating a Presentation
for Engineering Outreach 
​
This foundational badge, which is for Engineering Ambassadors (EAs), teaches you how to create an EA outreach presentation. In this badge, you will first learn the strategy for the content and structure of an engineering ambassador presentation. Second, you will learn the weaknesses of following PowerPoint's defaults to communicate your technical work. Then you will learn the three most important principles of the assertion-evidence approach. Once you understand the principles, you are to create and deliver an assertion-evidence presentation for a middle school or high school audience. Finally, you are to deliver that presentation to an outreach audience (or your EA program advisor).
1. Changing the Conversation about Engineering (about 25 minutes)

​For this first section of the badge, you are to review the Executive Summary of Changing the Conversation, which is a book by the National Academy of Engineers about how we can improve public understanding of engineering. The summary is 16 pages and should take you about 20 minutes to review. Please pay attention to the motivation of this work and the recommended messages.
2. Structuring a Scientific Presentation (about 7 minutes)

​This first section provides an overview of the structure of an engineering ambassador talk. For this section, you are to view the film to the right. 

3. Common Problems with Slides in Presentations (about 8 minutes)

​This section challenges the way that most engineers and scientist design slides for their presentations. The first film discusses the inherent problems that prevent most slides from helping engineers and scientists effectively communicate their work. The second film discusses important assumptions about presentation slides.

PowerPoint's defaults are weak.

One important assumption is to use slides only when they serve the presentation.
​4. Principles of an Assertion-Evidence Presentation ​(about 20 minutes)

​This section discusses the three main principles of the assertion-evidence approach. After viewing these two films, you should download an assertion-evidence template, look it over, and then view the third film to understand how to use the template to create effective slides. 

Principles 1 and 2: (1) build your talk on messages, not topics; and (2) support your messages with visual evidence, not bulleteted lists.

Principle 3: Explain your visual evidence by fashioning sentences on the spot, but only after planning and practice.

Using a template to create assertion-evidence slides.
​5. Creating an Engineering Outreach Presentation

​This section challenges you to use the principles given above to create an engineering outreach presentation that follows the assertion-evidence approach. First, you are to submit the set of assertion-evidence slides that you have created to your EA advisor (or mentor at an EA training session). Then, after incorporating suggestions for those slides, you are to deliver that presentation. This outreach presentation, which can be a team presentation, should be for a specific audience, such as a chemistry class in high school. An example of such a presentation appears to the right.

Sample engineering outreach presentation that follows the assertion-evidence approach.