After the apprentice leaders met with Dr. Volz to learn how to coach presentations, we were prepared to watch the ENGI 120 students with a keen eye for common presentation faux paus. These included everything from “ums,” tense body language, a “question” or “?” slide, and how the students fielded questions.
I was pretty confident after watching the student’s practice presentations that these ENGI 120 students would do far better than we had previously imagined freshman students would do. And I have to say, I was still impressed with the presentations the day of. The students were eloquent, clearly enthusiastic, and yet professional. I was impressed with their designs and coolness on the spot when it came to technical questions. The surrey group had even constructed a little model to better explain the different design options.
However as newly trained coaches, we were noticing and writing down comments on possible areas of improvement for the students including talking speed and pauses.
Overall, we were impressed with the extraordinary group of freshman engineering students in ENGI 120. We were especially impressed with how engaged the presenter’s peers were during the different student presentations. Many of the students asked their peers great specific, technical questions at the end. I guess our skit on good and bad questions paid off!