I participated in Volume 10 Pecha Kucha Night Aberdeen and talked about engineering collisions for student experience. While the topic came to me easily, it was surprisingly harder than I thought it would be to craft ‘the story’ that held the slides together in a way that didn’t feel like a lecture. The titles for slides came fast enough too, and so did the images from @gapingvoid, which have always appealed to me and lent themselves well to the topic and the occasion.

The breakthrough in writing the story came after reading through the PECHA KUCHA: TIPS, RESOURCES & EXAMPLES page. This is what resonated for me:

Just start speaking about your next slide; it will likely appear midway through your first sentence. This makes for a more polished presentation rather than pausing for a few seconds to wait for the next slide to appear.

This helped the format make sense and I then understood why the stories I’d seen at other PK events worked so well.  From here I could use the usual ‘Make it Stick’ plus ‘Beyond Bullet Points’ approach that I use for presentations and pull it all together and then practice, practice, practice so that I could deliver it without notes.

Enjoying @scharlau 's colourful presentation @gapingvoid #pechakucha #aberdeen pic.twitter.com/86LVjderVF

— Amy Bryzgel (@PerformtheEast) May 26, 2015

This was an interesting exercise in working out the format, and I know that as with the Bright Club work in the past, this will help feed back into future talks.