🏆 Group Projects + Demo Day
🏆 Group Projects + Demo Day
Form teams of 3-4. Build a Streamlit app. Deploy it on EC2. Demo it live. Win mini-awards.
Demo day: Sat 20 Jun 2026 · 3 PM GMT
This is the cohort’s final week. Forget homework — you’re now shipping something polished enough to put on your portfolio, defend in a demo, and (potentially) sell to real customers.
📅 Timeline
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| Sat 13 Jun | Last Week 4 session — project options revealed |
| Sun 14 Jun | Team formation (use the WhatsApp group) |
| Mon 15 Jun | Teams declare their project + start building |
| Tue-Fri | Build, ship, polish |
| Sat 20 Jun 3 PM GMT | Demo day — 5 min pitch + 3 min Q&A per team |
| Sat 20 Jun (after) | Awards announced + LinkedIn shout-outs |
🎯 Pick a project
Each team picks ONE of these three. Read all three first — they’re different beasts.
| Project | Best for teams who… | Services |
|---|---|---|
| 🌍 Akwaaba — AI Tourism Guide | …love design, want to learn computer vision, care about cultural impact | EC2 · Rekognition · Polly · Translate · S3 |
| 📊 MarketPulse — SME Feedback Dashboard | …want to build something they could sell, love data + dashboards | EC2 · Comprehend · DynamoDB · SNS · CloudWatch |
| 📄 DocSmart — AI CV Analyzer | …are job-hunting, want to dogfood your own product | EC2 · Textract · Comprehend · S3 |
👥 How to form teams
In the WhatsApp group on Sunday 14 Jun:
- Anyone can post: “Looking for a team — I’m strong in [skill]”
- People reply, teams self-organize
- By Mon 15 Jun, every team must declare: team name, members, which project, who plays which role
- If you don’t have a team by Mon evening, message Shadrack and he’ll match you
💡 Team size: 3-4 students. Smaller = more work each. Larger = communication overhead. Three is the sweet spot.
🎭 Roles within a team
Each project has 4 distinct roles defined in its guide. The pattern is similar across all three:
| Role | What they do |
|---|---|
| UI Lead | Owns the Streamlit interface, picks design, handles polish |
| AWS Engineer | Provisions EC2/S3/IAM, owns deployment + uptime |
| AI/Backend Engineer | Wires the boto3 calls to AWS AI services |
| Data/Product Lead | Curates content, owns the demo script + presentation |
Roles are assigned on day 1. Stick to them.
🏅 The 5 mini-awards
Every team has a real shot at one of these:
| Award | What wins it |
|---|---|
| 🎨 Most Polished | Looks and feels like a real product. Beautiful UI, mobile-ready, attention to detail. |
| 💡 Most Innovative | Took the brief and added something unexpected — a feature nobody else thought of. |
| 🎤 Best Demo | Most compelling 5-minute pitch. Clear story, smooth live demo, confident speakers. |
| 📚 Best Documentation | A README a hiring manager would clone and run. Architecture diagram, setup steps, the works. |
| ❤️ People’s Choice | Voted by the cohort. The team everyone wishes they were on. |
You can win more than one. Aim for the award that fits your team’s strengths.
🎁 What you get
- 🏆 cloudwithshad swag (Shadrack-signed digital certificate + a physical sticker if you’re in Accra)
- 📣 LinkedIn shout-out from Shadrack
- 🌍 Featured spot in the next cohort’s promotional material
- 💼 Most importantly: a finished project for your CV
📐 Submission requirements
By Friday 19 Jun 6 PM GMT (before demo day), each team must submit in the WhatsApp group:
- ✅ Team name + names of all members + LinkedIn URLs
- ✅ Live URL of your deployed app (EC2 public IP works fine)
- ✅ GitHub repo URL — must contain code + a proper README
- ✅ Backup demo video — 60-90 seconds, screen recording of your app working (in case EC2 hiccups on demo day)
- ✅ Which single award your team is gunning for (or “any”)
🎬 The 5-minute demo structure
On demo day, you get 5 minutes to present + 3 minutes for Q&A. The winning structure (works for all 3 projects):
| Time | What |
|---|---|
| 0:00 — 0:30 | The problem you’re solving. One clear sentence. |
| 0:30 — 1:00 | Team introduction + roles. Quick. |
| 1:00 — 2:30 | THE LIVE DEMO. Practice this 10 times beforehand. |
| 2:30 — 3:30 | Architecture + the hard parts you solved |
| 3:30 — 4:30 | Lessons learned + what’s next |
| 4:30 — 5:00 | Strong closing — why your project matters |
⚠️ Always have a backup demo video. If the live demo breaks, you smile, say “here’s a recording from earlier”, play the video, and keep going.
🚨 Common pitfalls
| Pitfall | Fix |
|---|---|
| Team picks roles but ignores them | Daily 10-min standup. Each person reports what they did + what’s blocking them. |
| App breaks on demo day | Test the EC2 URL from a phone (different network) the night before. Have a backup video. |
| Bad pitch | Rehearse with a timer. Five minutes goes FAST. |
| Last-minute scramble | Lock features by Wednesday. Spend Thursday + Friday on polish, not new features. |
📦 What’s in each project folder
group-projects/
├── README.md ← you are here
├── akwaaba-tourism/
│ ├── README.md ← project-specific overview
│ ├── GroupProject1_Akwaaba...html ← the full guided walkthrough
│ └── starter-code/ ← example app.py + facts.csv
├── marketpulse-feedback/
│ ├── README.md
│ ├── GroupProject2_MarketPulse...html
│ └── starter-code/
└── docsmart-cv/
├── README.md
├── GroupProject3_DocSmart...html
└── starter-code/
Open the HTML walkthrough in each folder for the complete 8-phase guide with code, AWS configuration, deployment steps, polish checklists, and demo rehearsal scripts.
🙌 A note about competition
This week is competitive — but not against each other. You’re competing against your own previous best.
The team that wins Most Polished doesn’t “beat” the team that wins Most Innovative. Five teams, five awards, all winners.
The real prize: a project on your CV that helped you land a cloud role.
⬅️ Back to repo