September Newsletter
Hi, my name is Elliott, and welcome to my newsletter! I’m a 13-year-old who wishes to impact the world through technology. And with the power of the TKS program, I hope I can! Here’s my September newsletter for TKS.
September Highlight: Presentation Skills
The most exciting thing I thought we did this month in TKS!
‘The Next Big Thing’. We had to predict an invention that could revolutionize the world in 10 years. In 50 minutes. It did not go well…
My group chose Graphene. It’s just a material that is up to 300x stronger than steel. Pretty strong right? That was basically it, so you’d think we’d finish in time, right? Nope. We spent 30 minutes just choosing the topic and finding a template for our slide… Well, now we have 20 minutes to make a full-blown presentation on something that none of us even knew existed before.
We quicken the pace and barely managed to finish the presentation in time… Phew.
The first group presents. It’s about Li-Fi, basically Wi-Fi but it sends information through visible light rays. Know what the first thing our director says to the group? “No. Templates.” Shoot.
Takeaways:
- No templates, be professional.
- No bullet points. (This isn’t a presentation, don’t worry)
- It’s a presentation, not a book; don’t even write more than one sentence on a slide. You’re the presenter, you’re saying the words, not the presentation.
- Don’t use crappy stock photos, and make sure that elements in a slide are coherent with one another.
And as you can expect, all of us did terribly and the director might have said some… harsh words. But think of it this way: it was just constructive criticism.
AI Technical Session
This was the first technical session of the year. For this one, in a group, we went onto Open AI and tried out some of the pre-built AIs on there. It was pretty cool. We checked out one where you could start a conversation then the AI would do its best to respond with a response that made sense. We also looked at one which could convert a movie title to emojis! It was just a great experience in general!
Thanks for reading my newsletter!
