Presentations

Your second-last lab session (Monday, May 14 or Tuesday, May 15) will be devoted to student presentations on Python packages or topics.

The purpose of the presentations is to give you practice finding, learning about, installing, and using Python packages and related software.

Each presentation should last about 10 minutes (about 10 slides). An additional 5 minutes will be allocated for setting up and for questions from other students and the instructor. There will be 7 presentation slots scheduled in each 110-minute lab session.

To coordinate the selection of topics, please e-mail me the day and time of your lab section, your topic and the members of your group.  When I receive your e-mail I will update the News item on the course home page that has the list of topics that have been selected for each lab section.

You will have to do the presentations in pairs because there are only 7 time slots per lab session. However, if your lab set has fewer than 14 students some students may be able to present on their own.

The topics or packages below are those I think might be of most interest to students in the EE program. However, you can present on another  topic with my approval. I will not approve trivial packages (e.g. winsound).

In each lab set there should be only one presentation on each topic.

Most Python packages can be found on Python Package Index (PyPI) and installed using the pip utility. Many can also be installed via the conda and Anaconda package managers.

The presentations will be marked by your peers using a rubric to be supplied. You will receive the median mark assigned by your peers   unless it differs significantly from the instructor's evaluation.

Suggested Topics

Using Python

• explain how python packages are organized, the PyPI site, virtual environments, and the pip command
• demonstrate a Python package that allows you to read and/or write an application-specific file format (e.g. .xls spreadsheets).

Networking Applications

• demonstrate how you can use Python to retrieve web pages and extract data from them (e.g. using the requests and beautiful soup packages)
• show how Python can be integrated into a web server. This could be anything from a simple wsgi script to a large Python-based framework like Django.

Data Analysis and Plotting

• compare Numpy with Matlab
• explain the Pandas dataframe data structures and how they compare to spreadsheets
• give an overview of some SciPy packages that you think your colleagues would find interesting (e.g. matplotlib and seaborn)

Gaming and Graphics

• develop a simple game using pygame, pyglet or other Python-based graphics package

Other

• demonstrate how to write a simple GUI using pytk or pyqt
• demonstrate Micropython runing on a microcontroller
• demonstrate an OpenCV application runing on the Raspberry Pi