This week in the developer book club that I facilitate, I saw yet another way to give an engaging presentation, one which is fairly effortless and straightforward to set up. The presenter simply took some example code from the book, and pulled it over into an IDE so that we'd be able to play with it a bit, and then during the presentation he spoke a bit to the parts that he understood, and then asked questions about the parts that he didn't understand, which in turn led to useful and meaningful conversations.
I think that this experience helps illustrate some very important points about what the role of the presenter is. In particular, the presenter is not meant to be a teacher, but rather is meant to lead the conversation. Ideally at this point, everyone has read the chapter, and as such none of the material presented should be new to them (though, of course, in real life, there's always some that either weren't able to read it or only got through part of it). As such, teaching the topic is pointless, because everyone already knows it. What is useful at this point is getting people to think critically on the topic.
I have found that, past the initial studying to gain knowledge, there are three things that promote critical thinking on a topic: questions, experimentation, and conversation. This is why, in the initial article where I describe the presenter role, I prescribed coming up with a practice problem, and having the group tackle the problem via mob programming during the meetup. The practice problem is a question, in particular, it's a question that is easy to experiment with, and the mob programming setup is an environment that allows experimentation as a group, which in turn promotes conversation.
With that being said, if you, as the presenter (or anyone else in the group, for that matter), have legitimate questions about the topic that you don't have answers to, then those questions are frequently more worthwhile than a made up question, especially if there's a good way to experiment with and explore the question, so as to find and better understand the answer.
