SCIENCE IN PUBLIC

          Overall, I think that our Transforming Tech project portrayed an effective transformation. Our main goal was to take the entertaining CNN video of Talking Dogs at Tech and transform it into a promotional presentation through the intuitive format of a Prezi. We chose a Prezi because we all agreed that it was another way to aim at our targeted audience. It is a new-age technology and a little less professional than a Power Point presentation. We wanted the less professional side because we were trying to excite 1st year undergraduate students to want to help out with research for the FIDO project rather than targeting professionals to give us grants to finish the research for the project. I think our group did well with figuring out the key points we needed to focus on in order to interest and relate to our audience. We decided that it was important to first catch their attention with why this project uses dogs and since the audience was mostly coming from engineering or science majors we further captured their attention with putting some science in the presentation with how dogs learn. Then we wanted our audience to understand what the FIDO project has done so far and what we hope to accomplish with it in the future. Adding in the future part makes the audience feel like they can be a part of it and it makes them more excited to join. Even though I believe that this part of the presentation was done really well, one thing I would change about our Revised Text is the very beginning. I think we needed a better introduction and even though we had planned on just jumping into the recruitment process, we should have made it clear that we were recruiting because some of the audience was lost until near the end.

          My role in this project was to research how dogs learn and to put together the Prezi. For me, putting together the Prezi was my greatest challenge. Even though the Prezi format is very “cool” looking, it is not so easy to make it look cool. Personally, I wish I had more time to make the Prezi look a little better, but overall, I think it did its job and was effective in the way we wanted it to. In the beginning of creating our project we had planned to create a video presentation for recruitment; however, as we started to execute this we decided to go down a slightly different path. Instead, we chose to write a script along with a live presentation. We wanted the presentation to be live so that it would be more personable than a recruitment video online. I am glad that we chose this in the end because I believe that we were able to keep the audience’s attention throughout the whole presentation rather than just playing a video and potentially losing some of the audience’s attention. Even though we ran through some difficulties with the process of creating the Prezi, I think that in the end we were able to effectively transform the CNN video.