Week 4: Creating an informative poster or presentation

In this lesson, students will plan and organize a poster or PowerPoint presentation. They will use spacing, margins, colors, and layout to maximize effectiveness and list information about their invention.

Learning outcomes

Students will:

• Plan and organize layouts for a poster or PowerPoint presentation.
• Compose and list information pertaining to their inventions.
• Apply details of spacing, margins, colors, and layout to maximize poster or PowerPoint effectiveness.

Teacher planning

Time required

Multiple forty-five minute sessions depending on student and teacher expectations

Materials needed

• A variety of posters
• Poster board, 1 per student
• Consumable supplies including: construction paper, permanent markers, and colored pencils
• Rulers
• Computers with Microsoft PowerPoint (if creating a PowerPoint presentations)

Pre-activities

Students should have completed earlier Invention Convention lessons.

Activities

Although most students have previously created a poster, the purpose of this lesson is to help students identify components of effective posters and PowerPoints that make information easily identified and understood while being aesthetically pleasing. The lesson is specifically designed for posters, but the skills can be utilized in creating PowerPoints as well.

Part one

1. The teacher will acquire and display several different posters from various sources. Some examples may include:
   • Movie posters
   • Community events
   • Church dinners
   • Advertisements
   • Campaign signs
   • Billboard pictures
   • Full-page newspaper ads
2. As a class, students will brainstorm the purpose of posters. Some responses may include:
   • To get people’s attention
   • To get people to do something
   • To give people information
3. Working in partners, the students will compare and contrast an array of posters. The teacher will guide the students to look beyond the what will initially stand out to the students, and to notice components such as:
   • Number of colors used (usually, no more than three)
   • Size of the font (large and easily read from a distance)
   • The presence of margins (consistent amount all the way around)
   • How writing is conveyed using brief amounts of information with bullets
   • Use of graphics or pictures (very few, usually one)
4. When time is up the students can share their observations, which will hopefully include the attributes listed above.
5. For each attribute, the students should explain why those are effective. For example, using fewer colors makes the writing stand out and more obvious to readers. Have a large font size makes the wording easier to read. Having margins makes the poster appear neat and makes it seem easier to take in all the information. Bullets and brief phrases tell readers just enough information to get them more interested. One graphic allows the reader to concentrate on the most important image.
6. The teacher will bring the discussion to a close by making this information relevant to the students’ Invention Convention. The student’s posters should:
   • Attract people’s attention at the Invention Convention.
   • Give people basic information about their invention such as:
     • What is this?
     • Who created it?
     • Why is it important?
     • (Possibly) How does it work?
   • Make people want to know more about their invention.
   • Adhere to attributes that make posters effective.

Part two

• Following the introductory lesson to posters, students will create posters of their own. If time allows, teachers may want students to create a poster plan on a blank white sheet of paper. The students can block out general spaces where they will place information and graphics so they will have a plan to work from when using their poster board.
• The teacher should remind students that these posters will be used to attract people to view their invention up close at the Invention Convention.
• Students should be reminded to adhere to the poster attributes so they will have effective posters to display at Invention Convention.

Assessment

When posters are completed and prior to the official Invention Convention, the teacher will assign student pairs and will distribute a peer poster rubric. The less familiar the pairs are with student’s actual invention, the more objective the student opinions and evaluations will be. Each student will use the rubric and their partner’s poster to evaluate the effectiveness of the poster. The teacher should remind the student not to ask the partner for additional information, but to rely only on the poster.