Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us for yet another weekly update.

This past week, we finished a rough draft of our Preliminary Design Report (PDR) presentation, and we practiced with our peers. It was very fun and eye-opening to see what other groups are doing and to have a chance to see what they thought of us and our project.

First, we all really enjoyed spending time with our classmates and pointing out the great work they’d been doing. It was great hearing about their approaches to their projects, and it was also cool to see how they presented certain topics in their presentations; I think watching our peers gave us some ideas on ways to step up our game.

Next, while it might have been a bit difficult to stand up and be judged on our work, our team saw it as a great way to get feedback and improve! Many of the comments we received pointed out that our presentation didn’t flow correctly or left out some key details at the beginning. We took this to mean we needed to elaborate and focus on clarity.

With this in mind, EvapoGATOR added more information including a clear problem statement at the beginning of the presentation and more visuals of conceptual ideas toward the end. We also added a pretty cool gif (seen below) of the process of vacuum evaporation to visually aid the people we’re presenting to. (edit: for some reason, I can’t figure out how to get the gif to work, so please just enjoy the diagrams of each stage of the process, and imagine they’re moving)

After a lot of hard work, long hours, and tears when Microsoft Word wouldn’t respond for the 15th time in 10 minutes, our team feels proud of the work we are presenting. We have all put a lot into this project so far, so wish us luck on our PDR presentation on Tuesday!