Excuse me, can you sum up your three-week-long work in three minutes, please? No worries, feel free to dance, sing, draw or just simply stand out to the podium, but make sure we are 100% entertained!
Eventually, the time has arrived to keep our final, paper presentations. Since we were around 30 people in the class, it would have taken ages to do it in a usual way. Therefore, Anna, our course leader searched for a creative way to solve the problem.
Science slam was the solution. Have you heard about it? It is a scientific presentation where experts explain their work in a short 10-minute-talk for a layman audience. The main goal is to communicate their research in an understandable, concise and entertaining way for everyone. That’s what we had to do as well!
And that was one of my biggest fears… How on Earth am I going to narrow down 15000 characters to 3 minutes? Should be brief and should make sense, moreover: entertaining?? Hardly the easiest thing to achieve…Turned out, it was a challenge not just for me, but for everyone. Though, we nailed it! The day was even spiced with the task that we had to evaluate one another by writing comments of the performances. You had to list two positive things and one that they still need to improve.
In mine, I had the idea to start with a tiny story, showing a car on his way bumping into a nature visitor centre. Just a small tale screening my simple sketches while telling the journey of the tourist. Later, when I got all the feedback from my class, I was glad to read them – they all stated it was a creative way to raise people’s attention and make them interested in the topic. Hurray!
So it revealed, that it’s really a possible way to catch people’s attention and make them interested in your research subject. I could stay focused on every presentation without getting distracted for a second. By following the guideline “less is more”, sometimes, instead of a long and boring speech, you can make yourself understood by just saying a little and expressing the gist.
What would be your tool?