Time to show your project to everyone

You have been working hard for the last four weeks — now it is time to prepare for the final presentation. In this document, you can find all the information about your final project presentation.

The audience is a mix of people: HYF alumni, HYF mentors, HYF staff and future HYF trainees. Not all of them have technical knowledge, so make sure your presentation is easy to follow for everyone in the audience.

The structure of the presentation

Introduction: name your project and introduce the team members.
Play your one-minute promotional video.
Describe your project in depth and explain what problem you wanted to solve by building this project and why. Explain how your project solves this problem.
Demo: show the application in action.
Describe the technologies you used to build it. (Keep this brief — there will be non-technical people in the audience.)
Technical accomplishments: which technical challenges did you face, and how did you solve them? Pick one or two concrete examples from the application.
Teamwork and collaboration: how did you work as a team, what worked well, what didn’t? What were the main challenges and how did you overcome those?
Questions from the audience.

Presentation requirements

The presentation should be minimal 20 minutes, max. 30 minutes long. Quality matters more than quantity.
Every team member must present something. You decide who presents what and when. If you feel shy or anxious, presenting one small part or a single slide for a minute is enough.
Use slides to support your presentation. Make sure the order is logical and that the build-up makes sense to someone who has not seen the project before. Keep each slide to a few keywords; images are highly appreciated.
The presentation must include a working demo of your application running on its cloud deployment (for example, c55a.hyf.dev). Do not present from your local development environment.
Your presentation must include a one-minute promotional video of the application in 16:9 format, with captions and music but no narration (details below).

Slides

Slides support your presentation; they do not replace it.
Avoid putting too much text on a slide. Prefer short sentences that you can explain in detail to the audience.
Visual aids work best on a slide (charts, illustrations, images, and so on).
Include screenshots of your application in your slides as a fallback in case the demo does not work. If the demo works, you can skip them.

Slide creation tools

We recommend a cloud-based slide tool, so that you can present from any computer. Here are some of our favourites:

Google Slides — simple, accessible from the web, and easy to share.
Canva — a strong visual tool for building presentations, with advanced AI features.
Prezi — interactive, cloud-based presentation software that replaces traditional slide decks with a dynamic, zoomable canvas.

A short video

Create a one-minute video that shows your application and highlights its most important features. Think of it as a trailer for your project: something you can also share on LinkedIn or add to your portfolio.

No narration. The video should be non-verbal: screen recordings of the application, on-screen captions, and background music. No voiceover and no talking heads required. This keeps the video short and punchy, and it removes the pressure of recording a good voice track in a second language.

Upload the finished video to YouTube (or a similar platform) and play it from there during the presentation.

Example from Cohort 52:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFZ5JKJcIFU

How to approach it

Do not build the video from scratch. Start from a template, then replace the placeholder content with your own screen recordings and captions. That is how the good ones are made.

Pick a template first. Search for “app promo”, “product promo”, or “device mockup” templates in one of the tools below. Choose a 16:9 (landscape) template that already has the animation, transitions, and music you like.
Plan the story. Decide which three or four features you want to show, and in which order. One caption per scene, a few words each.
Record your screen while using the application. Record one short clip per feature rather than one long take. Keep the mouse movements slow and deliberate, and use realistic demo data — no “asdf” or “test test”.
Drop your clips into the template, replace the placeholder captions with your own, and adjust the timing. Leave the animation and music as they are.
Export in 16:9 at 1080p or higher, and upload to YouTube (or any other publicly accessible video platform).

Tools to use

All of these are template-based, need no video editing experience, and have a free tier. An LLM is useful for drafting and shortening your captions.

Canva — the best starting point. Search its template library for “app promo” or “product promo”, then drag your screen recordings into the animated device frames. Browser-based, works on any operating system.
FlexClip — app promo templates built around animated phone and laptop mockups. Drop in a screenshot or recording and the motion is already done for you.
CapCut — large template library, automatic captions, and a big music collection. Strong for the punchy, fast-cut style.
Jitter — free animated device mockup templates. Duplicate a template, drop in your recording, and export. Good if you want the “screen floating inside a moving frame” look.
Previewed — 3D device mockup animations from templates. The free tier covers a single project, which is exactly what you need.

Recording your screen

You still need the raw footage of the application. Any of these will do:

Loom — browser extension, fastest to set up.
OBS Studio — free and open source, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Your operating system's built-in recorder (Windows Game Bar, macOS Shift+Cmd+5, GNOME screen recorder).

Privacy

Do not include anyone's name, photo, or face in the video without their explicit permission. This applies to your team members, your mentors, and anyone else. The same goes for the demo data inside the application: use made-up names and details, never real personal data of real people.

Tips from the team

Being nervous is natural and understandable. Remember that you are presenting your work to our community, which is friendly, supportive, and proud of how far you have come.
Practise in advance. Do one or two full run-throughs before the real presentation; online run-throughs work fine too.
For the demo, one person can control the laptop while another explains to the audience. This takes coordination between at least two people, so practise it as well. Decide in advance the order of the features you will show.
Make it informative, but also make it fun!

References

Slides from previous final project presentations, for inspiration:

Final Project Overview