- Identify FIVE specific things in your slides that you could have done differently.
One of the comments from the judges mentioned including an image about the disease in adults – not just children. This is a very easy and specific change that could help viewers understand the device in one of our key targets – newborns.
Building off of this, we could’ve clarified that the device works for both newborns and adults. Although the device is directed to newborns – because of the lack of diagnostic devices for this age group – its dynamic range allows it to also be accurate for adults. This is an important piece of information that we feel may have confused the audience.
Another important thing that could’ve been done differently was the scientific jargon. Although this made sense to us and some of the judges, the students seemed to be very confused. Next time, we will do a very broad overview of the science of the device and go into more detail in the questioning as need be.
A few of the judges emphasized the education component of our project in their comments – which is definitely something we could highlight more in our presentation next time. Some of this was missed due to time constraints but, our team believes a clear slide about our plans for sickle cell education programs and their importance should be added next time.
Lastly, the judges suggested having an additional slide on the future plans of the project. When we talked about the future, it was a lot of talking and few visuals. For next time, we could do a better job of adding engaging visuals on the slides that supplement what we are saying so that viewers can both see and hear our plans.
- Identify FIVE specific ways in which you could have delivered your presentation better.
One improvement that could have been made was to include the information about our partnerships and in-country connections at the beginning of our presentation so that we could avoid getting this part of the presentation cut off. Since our presentation ran a little long, our last slide had to be quickly summarized. This led to judges having questions about the education aspect of our project and how we were going to use our connections to help with the follow up procedure after diagnosis. By placing this slide earlier in the presentation we would have avoided this confusion and had more of an explanation.
Furthermore, one of the judges suggested having an additional slide on the future plans of our project. While we included a general outline of what we were planning to do for this summer as well as fieldwork in Sierra Leone, we could have mentioned more specifics about what this plan will look like in action. This would likely entail shortening some of the background information we provided in order to allow for longer discussion of our fieldwork plans.
Another factor to consider to improve the delivery of our presentation would be to offer a more simplified and concise description of how our test strip scientifically functions. In our presentation, we summarized how our device works successfully, incorporating the most important scientific terms. However, we could improve in our summarization so that the general audience is less confused.
From observing other teams’ project presentations, including the GRO Mushroom team, it would be helpful for our team to bring in a sample of our test strip during our presentation to allow the judges and audience to better visualize and understand our device and how it works. Having a physical sample in hand might allow our team to better explain how it functions.
A final way we could have improved this presentation would be to have a clear signal to one another indicating which of us would answer each question or have a better way to determine who would speak. We had some feedback regarding talking over one another and this may have been a good way to reduce this issue.
- Identify FIVE specific ways you could have built your credibility further.
We could have built our credibility further by mentioning the IRB approvals that we have received for doing fieldwork in Sierra Leone. This would allow the judges to see that our work is approved for in-country applications and that our project is quite credible.
We also could have had more of a discussion around the previous awards and funding that we have received. As mentioned earlier, our project was cut a little short, and so an in depth discussion of our partnerships, awards, and funding was cut out. Allowing the judges to hear about the various organizations that have approved or praised our work would build further credibility.
Another way we could have built credibility would be by elaborating on our connection to Dr. Jaja and the work that he will help us to do in the future. His collaboration with us will be extremely beneficial in furthering our venture and testing our device.
To further build our credibility, we could also elaborate on the systems of the operations of our project, for the wide-spread implementation of our device in Sierra Leone to make our dream a reality. We should further discuss how we plan to bring the materials of our test strip for use in Sierra Leone, to educate health workers how to use our device to diagnose and record sickle cell disease, as well as implementing specific treatment plans.
Another point that could have further built our credibility would have been to provide more specific information on our educational plan. I think we spent a lot of time on the device and its implementation, which left something to be desired for the other side of our venture. The education is very important to the success of the venture as a whole as well as the device implementation and may have deserved more time in our presentation.
- Identify FIVE specific questions that you could have answered better. What was the question, how did you respond, how should you have responded?
One comment by a judge was that we should have limited the ‘cross-talking’ while we were answering questions. This is an extremely important point because looking at each other/trying to figure out who should answer what question is informal and takes away from the focus of our presentation. The judge asked us a question about the technicalities of our device and if we were using human blood to test our strips. Since we had been talking about the antibodies on our test strip we were confused on whether or not he was asking about the mouse and goat antibodies we used. We should have responded by simply explaining that we are using purified HbS and HbA from humans.
Our answer to the question of what is our ultimate goal and metric of success could have been answered more clearly. We had stated that there would be ideally a reduction of under 5 deaths by 5,000 per year after 5 years of integration. It should have also been stated that ideally there should be a way to measure the success of the education aspect of our campaign. Another good metric is the test strip being in the standard operating procedures for all places in Sierra Leone where children are born. This is a difficult thing to quantify due to the high number of home births, but it should have been stated as well with this particular question.
There was a question on how stable the test strips are and how long they last. Our answer was that we have used them for a certain amount of time after sitting around for a few months. After this it devolved into talking about the different antibodies and hemoglobin being used. This could have been answered better by saying that we do not currently have a very good understanding of how long these test strips last, but we could have included that we have been testing in the lab with strips that were prepared in December. This may be the only accidental test to determine the shelf life because the strips were prepared before fieldwork that got canceled. However, they have been still functional in recent tests which show that they remain stable for at least ~2-3 months. This was mentioned briefly, but should have been the main point of the answer.
We were asked how our venture would be different from other similar projects in the past. We responded by addressing our competitors and the differences between us and them. This was a pretty effective response, but it may have been a little indirect for the specific question. It would have been beneficial to answer directly the core innovations of our device first. These are its low cost and being able to be used on newborns without diluting the blood.
Another question we were asked was is it cost prohibitive to test every single newborn. I think our team had a hard time understanding this referee because we did not mention cost in our answer to this. We spoke about how we would reach as many newborns as possible and attempt to test all of them, but we omitted the key point of the question, which was the cost of testing.