Identify five things you could do better with your seven-minute presentation.

1. Slide design – the slide design could be improved to make the presentation more easier for the audience to follow and understand.
2. Better articulate our metrics of success.
3. Amount of information in the presentation – We had too much information in our presentation, so we lost audience’s attention a bit
4. Pace of the presentation – The presentation felt a bit rushed at the end since we did not manage well the seven minute limit.
5. Ending of our presentation – our presentation would’ve been more effective if we had an ending slide which would summarize our most important messages.

Did you respond to the referees’ questions in a concise and precise manner? Describe five responses you could have approached differently.

1. Some of the main concerns that the judges expressed had to do with the infrastructure aspect of our venture (i.e., how we will not be able to see a spike in recycling despite the peoples’ efforts if there is no infrastructure in place). Our team knew the answer to this question but were not concise enough when it came to elaborating more on it, and it seemed as though the judges did not receive any genuine clarification. If we had elaborated on this more (e.g. specify that the government is investing millions of dollars into recycling infrastructure already), it would have greatly benefited our overall presentation. For our final presentation, we will try to include a slide on this part of the venture, as well as rehearse more concise responses. 
2. Most of the judges struggled to understand how implementing our app in classrooms would lead to short-term and long-term change, and we did not have enough time to cover everything that we wanted to say about this topic. It would have been wise to sacrifice some of the more irrelevant content in our presentation in favor of deeper explanations regarding the logistics of our venture, instead of saving all of our information for the Q&A session. 
3. Generally speaking, our team was getting slightly flustered at some points, as there were a few questions that we hadn’t anticipated or practiced answering beforehand. Now that we have a clearer idea of what will be asked at our final presentation, we should have an easier time coming up with FAQs and anticipating the judges’ questions. 
4. Most of the student feedback that we received had to do with a) the answers not being evenly distributed among the team members  b) us being confused as to who was going to answer which questions. We will try to be mindful of these comments at our next presentation and make sure that everything is structured better. 

Identify five techniques / strategies (content, design, answering questions, etc) that other teams did particularly well…that you could adopt for your own team.

The following are five strategies well executed by other teams that Save Tuba will look to incorporate into our future presentations:

1. Final slide – a couple teams finished their presentations with a slide that summarized/listed the title and order of their backup slides. That final slide provides the audience with a list of categories of additional available information and it helps the team know what slide they would need to quickly move to assist answer a question posed.
2. Pace of presentation – Some teams’ (i.e. Air Quality Almaty) presentations demonstrated that they mastered a steady and not hurried pace when delivering their message.  These teams created a good balance with the amount of talking that was well coordinated with the number of slides in their presentations.  A key lesson learned was that we tried to deliver too much content, both with our verbal presentation and the number of slides. 
3. Clarity of slides – The PowerPoint slides from some of the teams (i.e. PlasTech Ventures, GRO Mushrooms, Mothers of Sierra Leone and Sickle Cell Diagnostic) were visually appealing and easy to understand. The slides had a simple, yet sleek design that conveyed the critical information without too much text. Although some of our slides were able to accomplish this design feature, one critical slide that seemed to have failed was the Timeline slide, which had too much information (visuals and text).  We will look to replicate the clarity that other teams accomplished by simplifying that slide to similarly be simpler and project a sleek design.
4. Leverage lessons learned – Zero College Hunger, specifically, demonstrated how they used lessons learned from other similar ventures (albeit in other countries) to inform their project. The importance of being able to accomplish this is underscored by the suggestion offered from a referee at the end of our presentation to learn from what other apps have done to address the hurdle with needing to translate the app.
5. Fielding questions from the referees – several teams worked like a well oiled machine when fielding questions.  Individuals from their perspective team knew when to answer a question with little hesitation or wasted time to offer a response.