Poster Guidelines

Overview

The poster respresents a significant portion of your grade for the class; please take the time to do a nice job.

Page Layout

Your poster will be printed as single 24 x 36 inch page. You should use a program (for example, MS Powerpoint, or Open Office Impress) that can produce PDF files and set the page layout to a custom (user specified) size of 24" wide and 36" long. You should also allow for at least a 0.5 inch margin around the edges of the page.

Your poster should be oriented in portrait mode (longer dimension vertically). If you want to use a background image, make sure it is a very light one, otherwise it will use up a lot of ink and decrease the readability of your poster.

Content and Formatting

Title

The title section will be a text box centered at the top of your poster containing the following:

Title of poster (48+ point text, centered)
Author(s) name (24-26 pt, centered)
CS 460, Semester, Year (24-26 pt, centered)
Wartburg College, Waverly, IA 50677 (24-26 pt., centered)

Introduction (title 20-22 pt, centered; body 18-20 pt, filled)

The introduction should provide the reader with the background required to understand the contents of your poster. It should give the motivation for the project you have undertaken, that is it should succinctly describe the background for the problem that you are attempting to solve. As much as possible, try to make your introduction flow from general background to specific information about your project. The final part of the introduction should be a sentence or two that explains the design goals for your project.

System Design (format same as intro)

This section should describe the "architecture" of your system. What hardware and software tools are you using and why. How the various pieces of your system fit together. For a database system, this might be a description of the tables and the interface. For a web system, it is some description of the processing components and views of the site. There is obviously a lot of latitude here depending on what kind of system you are designing. This would be a good place to include some interface views or block diagrams to describe system structure.

Project Status (same format)

Here you should describe where your project is in terms of meeting the design goals outlined in the introduction. You might not have your system up and running yet, if so explain what difficulties you have run into. If your project is completed, is it deployed? Is it currently being used or assesed for use?

Future Work (same format)

What do you see as future directions for your system? How could it be made more useable or flexible. What additional projects do you see as possible stemming from your work.

Figures and Tables

Diagrams, graphics, and tables should be positioned to make the poster look nice. Each of these external items should be labeled (e.g. Figure 1: High-level architecture of the CHILL system.) both so that it stands on its own (i.e. the contents are described) and can be easily referred to in the surrounding text.

Acknowledgements (same format) Acknowledge those who helped in your project by supplying time, expertise, or dollars.

Conclusions

Brief recap of what you have accomplished over the term and why it's cool and/or significant. This might conclude with a two or 3 point bulleted list.

Poster Presentations

You will present your poster to our class electronically on Thursday before RICE day. If your poster is judged unsatisfactory, you will be asked to make changes and submit the updated poster by the next day.

The poster session is on the evening of RICE day from 7:00-9:00. You can start setting up at 6:30. You should plan to get there at least 15 minutes ahead of time to get set up (earlier if your setup is elaborate).

We will have power to some of the tables so that you can plug computers in for demos if desired. We will also, hopefully, have a projector cart for VR demos (if appropriate).