Design Event - Laptops

[Professor Gas Can]

Just wanted to know whether laptops can be used when talking to design judges. Obviously things that are easily printed, should be, but some of the design spreadsheets we have are pretty lengthy/cumbersome, especially if printed.
Thanks

[Conor]

Originally posted by Professor Gas Can:
Just wanted to know whether laptops can be used when talking to design judges. Obviously things that are easily printed, should be, but some of the design spreadsheets we have are pretty lengthy/cumbersome, especially if printed.
Thanks

If they're lengthy and cumbersome then you probably shouldn't be using them in your presentation....

[Professor Gas Can]

Sorry, to clarify, lengthy/cumbersome to print out. This is just so we wouldn't have to spend hours trying to cut our excel spreadsheets down to size for 8 1/2-11 printing.


Originally posted by Conor:
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Professor Gas Can:
Just wanted to know whether laptops can be used when talking to design judges. Obviously things that are easily printed, should be, but some of the design spreadsheets we have are pretty lengthy/cumbersome, especially if printed.
Thanks

If they're lengthy and cumbersome then you probably shouldn't be using them in your presentation.... </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

[screwdriver]

As Conor said, if they're lengthy and cumbersome on a sheet of paper, they won't be any better on screen.
If they are for calculations everybody does, like suspension or tyre calculations, you just need to mention them, maybe put a screenshot of excel with the sheets in place and only include the definitive results in the report. Graphs always look good.

But to answer the question: Yes they are allowed, there's no rule against it. Last year at the FSG design event, I've seen a few teams using laptops and a beamer.

The disadvantage of laptops is that only there's only one copy of the stuff around, and if you're surrounded by four or five judges, they'll have to squeeze to see what's on the screen. Printing stuff out and making several copies makes the conversation a lot more relaxed, imho.

[James Waltman]

Like this?

http://dot.etec.wwu.edu/fsae/HostedPics/2007_FSAE_West/Thursday/images/IMG_1679.jpg

This is from last year's Design Semi-finals Fontana. I'm pretty sure that it's SDSM&T (http://fsae.sdsmt.edu/).

[A Richards]

lol. I think that perhaps that 7 laptops takes away from the car a little to much. I really dont think that the judges are all that interested at looking at some made up FE model on a computer anyway.

Why point at a screen when they can see the real thing surely thats why we build them, otherwise we many as well just compete with CAD cars.

[Professor Gas Can]

Will do. Thanks.

[exFSAE]

A "tablet" PC would probably be a better option.

But as has been said, a small binder of easy to read, meaningful numbers and plots is the best solution.

What massive amount of tabular data would you need to present? Torque curves, springrates, kinematic suspension rates, aero maps, tire maps.. all lend themselves to graphic forms that are easy to see at a glance.

[Superfast Matt McCoy]

Definitely have your laptop booted up on a table with all of your spreadsheets open and ready just in case. That SDSM&T picture is a pretty good example, all the laptops ready to go but no one hovering around them.

[ben]

I prefer to talk one on one with team members with as little paper and/or laptops as possible. The conversation will eventually get to something that requires some data to back it up and then the good teams will find that data in seconds.

I'm very wary of teams that want to tell a story because it steers you away from the stuff they don't know.

A lever arch binder of datasheets and supporting evidence is actually more impressive than a laptop because you can physically see how much is there - that whets the appetite to discuss the car in more detail. UWM had this very well covered at FSG last year.

Ben

[Gareth]

From the 2 design finals I've been in I'd say the laptops are of some benefit, but they certainly shouldn't be the highlight of the show. Most of our talking points were on the design boards and you should know your methods well enough not to refer to spreadsheets. The judges are looking for results and methods, not the underlying data. Only occasionally will judges ask to see things in more detail and it's usually because they'd like to learn something new. :-) The laptop is definitely useful then.

Also, you can put video and many more pictures on a laptop to help explain things. Be sure to have everything extremely well organized so that it just takes a second or two to get to anything you'd consider presenting. The bottom line is that you should have everything in your head in terms of methods and the critical numbers. Design boards can show graphs and small data summarys.

In '06 Bill Mitchell asked us an interesting question in finals, which was how we were preserving our knowledge for future years. It helped to show our design binders, but we were also able to show our digital methods for organizing data within our team (like CAD, test results etc). I thought it was a very good question to be asking teams...