Sarah: Hi, John. Shall we make a start on that presentation about our battery-powered motorbike project?
John: Yes, let's. It'd be nice to do a good job for the university Open Day. I hope the lecturers think it'll interest people considering coming here to study.
Sarah: Well, they certainly should. And at least we won’t be assessed on it.
John: True. And I guess we should be proud our project was chosen over others in our class. Our project is unusual because people usually think of environmentally friendly vehicles as being relatively slow, but our battery-powered motorbike can reach up to 165 kilometers an hour—the same as many petrol-driven bikes.
Sarah: And it has an efficiency of 90%, whereas ordinary bikes are far less efficient—they waste a huge amount of energy.
John: Plus, our bike doesn’t need a petrol tank or an exhaust system, so markedly the design is more straightforward, and it’s also lighter.
Sarah: Anyway, it’s going to be quite a challenge to prepare something interesting and appropriate for all the people who might come.
John: Well, time is certainly going to be an issue.
Sarah: You mean in terms of how much we have to cover in only 15 minutes?
John: Well, I was thinking more about the fact that the talk is next week, and we have a lot of other stuff going on right now.
Sarah: Absolutely. So, how shall we organize things? We could do a short talk and allow most of the time for questions.
John: It’d be good to allow plenty of time for questions, but I think we need to present quite a lot too. We could start by showing a couple of minutes from the film of the race it took part in.
Sarah: Brilliant! I’m sure they’d love that. Then we can talk about how we built and tested the motorbike and so on. For example, one of us could talk through the project from the initial brief to the prototype stage, and then the other could take it on to testing and development.
John: Well, let’s deal with that later. It might be better to have just one of us doing the talking, but we don’t need to decide just yet.
Sarah: Okay, so what about the slides for our presentation? Shall we work on the text for those now?
John: Well, we could just use key words to help structure our talk.
Sarah: How about using mainly visuals? I took lots of photos as we went along, so it’d be easy to illustrate the progress of the project that way. It’s more interesting than diagrams, and slides with lots of text can be boring.
John: Okay, right. So, do you think we should discuss things with the lecturer before going much further? We could do that this afternoon.
Sarah: Wouldn’t it be better to get a first draft done? Then we’ve got something more concrete to discuss with him.
John: Sure, but I’d quite like a bit more input before we spend a lot of time preparing something that might not be what’s needed.
Sarah: Okay. When we worked with Amish in the fourth year, his tutor had him do something similar last summer, so I’m sure he’d give us some useful pointers.
John: Great. Let’s do that after lunch.
John: Let’s think a bit more about how the project went. That might give us some ideas.
Sarah: Okay. Well, first, I’d say that writing the report was hard.
John: Yeah, I was dreading having to write 80 pages in just a month. But actually, it was harder making sure we didn’t go over the length. Anyway, I never imagined we’d finish it with a day to spare.
Sarah: No, it was lucky your sister had time to proofread it. She picked up on several careless mistakes, especially in the bibliography.
John: Yes, well, she works in publishing, so she’s used to checking things. I suppose it helped that we kept detailed notebooks throughout the year. That was a chore, but worth it.
Sarah: Yes, I didn’t enjoy keeping mine up to date. I actually found it really time-consuming, noting down all the adaptations we made to the design as we went along. I hadn’t anticipated that.
John: Me too. And I thought the tutor could have given us a bit more advice at the beginning of the process.
Sarah: That’s right. I liked doing the concept sketches. For me, that was one of the best bits. I’ve always enjoyed those initial stages of the design process.
John: I was relieved that the tutor picked up on that mistake we made in our aerodynamic sketches. It would have been disastrous if that hadn’t been caught at an early stage.
Sarah: Exactly. Finding sponsors took quite some time, of course.
John: Yes, but we knew that’d be an issue. And I never expected it to be enjoyable—not like the actual hands-on project work. The tutor certainly came into his own at that stage.
Sarah: Yes. I never expected him to have such useful contacts in industry. Good thing for us he did, though.