March 15

A Crazy Presentation

We just finished another project called “Cray Cray Yay Yay” where we studied crazy people and their effect on the world, not literal crazy people but people who were called crazy for an idea they had.

We started this project with the apple “Think different” campaign. We got to choose a person featured in the video to make a “mini pecakucha” on.
If you don’t know what a pecakucha is, it’s a presentation with the format of 20×20. 20 seconds each slide for 20 slides.

For my “mini pecakucha” (20 seconds for 10 slides) my options were pretty limited since most people were chosen to pick before me. I ended up picking Thomas Edison to present on. When I tell you that this presentation was SUPER rushed I mean it, I wasn’t finished my slides and quecards until maybe 10 minutes before my presentation. I was literally rushing to finish my slides in Math.

Our final piece of the project was a full pecakucha in a group of 3-4. My group was Chris, Callum, and Jasper, our topic was “think different” so we focused on how these ideas were new and different at the time and how it was considered “crazy”

Before we fully started working on the full presentation, the teachers brought most of the class to Seattle to really understand where a lot of these “crazy people” came from and their stories. We visited some pretty well known places like the MoPop (Museum of Pop Culture), Microsoft, The Space Needle, Pike Place Market, Climate Pledge Arena (not for a hockey game unfortunately), and The Museum of flight, along with some less Seattle famous places like ifly.

Last night we presented our full pecakucha with our groups. We have been working on this project for almost 2 and a half months so I’m pretty happy it’s over now.

Here’s what happened during the presentation:

What went well

All of our slides were completed and approved by the teachers
We didn’t get behind or ahead at all, every time we practiced we were always a little behind our photos, but during the actual presentation we did really well with timing. If we messed up during any part of our slides the improv or what we said put us back on track really well. A few last sentences were rushed but it mostly stayed on track
we were really well memorized on our scripts, we didn’t stutter over many words.

What didn’t

I feel like our tone could have been better or some of us could have been louder for sure. I know a few people sounded a bit monotone at some parts.
our stage presence could have been better I guess? I feel like we looked frozen aside from me and Chris’ hand talking
coordinating what to wear better since not everyone was wearing black formal clothes

How to improve

Practice. Practice. Practice. We were told it shouldn’t sound like you’re reading a script or that it’s fully committed to memory because you want it to sound like you or sound “conversational”. I felt like I was still messing up a few words or sentences, not going in the direction I wanted them to.
eye contact, I definitely remember looking at the slides or anywhere but the audience so I want to work on that
Not part of the presentation but the work I put into the group, I definitely am not proud of the amount of work I put in and I feel really bad to Chris and Callum for putting so much work in for me.

How did I contribute

I put some doodles and extra drawings on the slides.
info about some people and photos for the slides
ideas for our thesis and notes

How the field study helped me learn

One of the topics in my notes were about Kurt Cobain. Since he was from Seattle, Nirvana had a whole section to itself that talked about its upbringing, history, behind the scenes, etc.
helped me connect to the project, driving question (Why does it take a crazy person to change the world) and ideas