Engineering Strategies & Practice

Many first-year engineering students struggle with APS111/112.

Engineering Strategies & Practice is a series of two design courses taken in first year in which you are placed in a group of six and tasked with solving a design problem for a client. In APS111, everyone gets the same project but you are unable to directly communicate with your client. In APS112, there will be dozens of projects each worked on by approximately two groups and you will have meetings and contact with your client.

As part of the design process, you and your group will be responsible for writing a few documents in support of your project. Engineering writing is direct and blunt. The ideal engineering document is word-efficient: Saying as much as possible with as few words as possible.

The "RNG factor"

Most students who talk about this course mention that it is "very RNG". This is partly true. The following may impact your grade in the course:

-Your teammates: Even the top engineering school in Canada has bad group members. In APS111 and 112, the group assignments are worth 40% and 60% of your marks, respectively. These marks can be impacted if your teammates act lazy with them. The best way to mitigate this is to set early internal deadlines have good contingency plans for if someone fails to meet them. This may require a significant amount of time for you to fix, so bad teammates will make your life harder (either you lose time or you lose marks)
-Your tutorial section: While the teaching team apparently meets to balance the grade averages in individual tutorials, a small sample size may prevent a good balance from being acheived if the tutorial is just really good or really bad (there are only 6 teams per tutorial). Your TA/CI/EM may also care more about certain aspects of the writing than others (though I do not know the degree to which this affects grades in practice).
-Your client (APS112): Not all projects are created equal. In APS112, topics may often not seem like engineering at all: I had to design a lego play area for Prof. Jason Bazylak's kids. Other groups had projects which seemed much more difficult to solve. While they are mainly testing you on your ability to follow the design process (and write) well, research and satisfying the client for some projects will be more challenging which will impact your final presentation, particularly if your client shows up.

As noted above, you are certainly able to remedy some of the obstacles you face in the course. As well, the writing style is more clear than high school English writing, which has much more fluff attached. You should avoid blaming your low grades entirely on uncontrollable factors. Doing so will inhibit your ability to improve as you may not feel motivated to put in any additional effort.

Secondary research

As part of ESP, you will need to do secondary research on existing solutions, as well as standards and best practices. Beware that sometimes standards can conflict with each other or how they may be implemented in practice (ex. being an objective rather than a constraint), so try finding multiple sources to back up your claim. This is called triangulation and it is encouraged by the teaching team. Sometimes, the conflicts are okay if they do not apply to the same situation (though the cases noted here they do). If they are not, consider which one has precedence over the other (ex. a provincial law vs. an organization's standards). I doubt you will run into as many conflicts as I do in my projects, but it would not be great to accidentally break the law.

Particular Assignments and Aspects of ESP

Perusall Readings (APS111)

As of 2025, these are no longer mandatory

Prior to 2025, you needed to buy or rent the online textbook. Most weeks, there were a few readings you must complete. Full marks for these were easy to obtain as long as you put in an ounce of effort. They were automatically graded based on things you did with the reading: Make a good comment, upvote or reply to someone else's comment, spend at least 10 minutes on the page, read the whole thing. A few minutes after you started the reading, the site's mascot began giving you suggestions. Once you had done enough to obtain full marks on that reading, the mascot ran out of suggestions. It was best to finish these early so they do not occupy your time while more important work takes up your time.

Engineering Observation (EO)

This assignment is a practice run of the kinds of observations you will be making in your actual project as well as the writing style you will be expected to follow in the future. Engineering writing is meant to be as short as possible while being clear. Any image you use in the EO must have a purpose in your document (refer to it in your text). It is worth 5% of your grade (formerly 7.5%).

Team Charter

Before you can start your design work, you must determine how your team will operate. Of particular importance are your roles (now only in APS112), ways of working (including internal deadlines), and contingency plans for if something goes wrong. They will expect you to have all situations you can reasonably expect to occur to have a clear solution based on what you have written in your team charter. In APS112, you are allowed to fire people. However, this requires multiple rounds of consultation with the teaching team and is extremely rare. When someone is fired, they will need to join a new team and will get 0% on any assignments due during that time.

The Client and Client Statement

In APS111, everyone will have the same client. You will not be able to directly interact with them, but a mid-semester Q&A will occur in which you can submit questions. The client statement can be whatever the client wants it to be. Some of the content will be unnecessary and some will be difficult to analyze. In the real world, clients are not expected to write as engineers do. You clear up anything you are not sure about through the Q&A session (APS111) or during your first client meeting (APS112).

In APS112, you will need to set up three client meetings during the semester. All client communication must be approved by the Engineering Manager (EM)² before being sent, including your intended questions during meetings. In-person meetings are preferred unless the client is located outside Greater Toronto or the client is unable to do one. One of my friends had to go to Markham for client meetings. Your engineering notebook will be very important here as you generally can not record meetings so your notes will be the only record of what happened.

The first meeting will be yours to ask questions that will help you with writing your Project Requirements. Use this meeting to clear up any confusion you have with what your client wants. Later client meetings will be after major assignments.

Project Requirements (PR)

Now that you have a client statement and have (hopefully) cleared up your confusion with your client, you can properly define the problem you are solving, and the scope and constraints of your solution. When writing, ensure you have all the essential information before you start trying to cut things. Think about what will matter for your project. After the introduction, the first part is the Problem Statement which contains the Gap, Need, and Scope.

The Gap, Need, and Scope can be best explained as follows: The Gap is what is missing in the world (the current situation), the Need is the thing which will solve that problem, and the scope is everything you are able to change. A good Gap and Need are very broad, including anything which the client does not explicitly say no to. The Gap, Need, and Scope are the most basic requirements, after that you have the FOCs. Your gap, need, and scope should not be very long. My APS112 Problem Statement was three short paragraphs, though the exact length of each section will vary depending on your project.

Problem Statement Quiz (APS111)

In APS111, you will have a Problem Statement Quiz worth 5% of your grade during which (as of 2025) you are asked to identify the gap, need, scope, and one claim that needs further research. You will later use these to write a problem statement (and eventually your PR!). The quiz also has five multiple-choice questions (new in 2025) about these concepts. To study for the quiz, I recommend practicing on a previous problem statement and reviewing the terminology.

In 2024, students were required to write a completed problem statement. This change was reversed in 2025.

FOCs, Stakeholders, and Service Environment

The Functions, Objectives, and Constraints are your detailed requirements. Your functions are what your design is required to do. More specifically, your primary function is what your design is supposed to do, while your secondary functions are the steps your design takes to do the primary function. They are a requirement. ESP lectures often use the analogy of a can opener. Its primary function is to open the can. To do this, it grips onto the can, tears a whole around the top of the can, then grips off the can when it is done. Those three things are its secondary functions. What is primary use of your design? How does it achieve that? This does not involve how well your design achieves that, that is where your problem comes in.

Your objectives are goals which are not completely necessary for the project but make it better. There is a clear way to measure how well a design satisfies them. Your constraints define what your design can not do. If you put a constraint in your Project Requirements, ensure it is strictly off limits rather than just a preference. Overconstraining yourself can hurt the later stages of your project. It is often the silliest ideas that succeed (this happened to my group in APS112 and our client really liked it).

As part of drafting your PR, you will observe and research the service environment which you design will operate in. This will involve the physical environment (including weather), the virtual environment (e.g. WiFi), and living things (but not humans). You should have any site visits done by the end of the weekend before the PR is due. Bringing a measuring tape is often very useful for physical projects (not so much for a wayfinding project), as is knowing where the boundaries are before you measure the site. Of course, exactly what you should be measuring will vary from project to project. For example, if your problem is poor wayfinding perhaps you want to see whether people understand where they're going. However, if your problem is a space being too crowded, better wayfinding will not solve your problem. What data can you use to better understand your gap? Go measure that.

You will also determine your interest holders (people other than your client who may be impacted by your design), formerly called stakeholders (which excluded the design's users). Your stakeholders list usually includes people and organizations living or doing business close to your site. These people and organizations may have conflicting interests. The TTC may be happy about a better access from Keele Station to High Park. However, such an access may also decrease ridership on the 203 - High Park seasonal bus route (but that may give the TTC reason to discontinue said route, saving them operational costs).

Client Review (APS112)

In APS112, you will need to modify your PR and have your EM approve it before sending it to your client. Your client will then look at it and in your 2nd client meeting, they may ask for changes before you all agree to it. For example, my client requested we lower our budget from $5,000 to $1,500³.

Teamwork Analysis (TWA, APS111) / Team Role Observation & Analysis (TROA, APS112)

In these individual assignments, you must choose a situation that occurred within your team, describe it, analyze it, and determine lessons learned from it. The team charter is an important part of both assignments, and if the situation was bad you will suggest changes to the team charter which will prevent a similar situation from occurring again. The TROA is worth 10% of your APS112 grade and the TWA is worth 5% in APS111 (formerly 7.5%).

For the TROA, the situation you choose must show how you fit your role in the team in that situation. If you do not think you fit your role you may suggest a different role which would be better suited for you in future teams.

This was comfortably my worst assignment in APS112, but my best in APS111.

Concptual Design Specifications (CDS)

Now that you have defined the problem completely, you can work on actually solving it! This starts with idea generation. When thinking of potential ideas, they want to you come up with at least 100. To ensure you have explored the design space completely, they encourage you to include really stupid ideas as well. This may seem silly, but in multiple cases it was the "dumb" ideas I thought of that were implemented as part of the solution.

Why are silly ideas fine? If they are truly stupid, they will be gone early in idea selection, the process of determining which of your ideas is best. If not, it might actually be a good one. During idea selection, you are encouraged to generate new ideas based on the ideas you find to be better (it is an iterative process). The course teaches you a few ways of doing this. The general way is to use a less time-consuming method at the start, with more detailed methods once you have few enough ideas for it to be worth your time.

Idea selection ends when you have three ideas remaining. The final three should have clear differences and all should look good to your client, with the choice the client makes being based on their priorities. For example, you may have three designs that cost different amounts, with the more expensive designs succeeding more in other ways. Based on your knowledge of the client's desires, you will make a recommendation for which idea to implement. However, the client can decide they want an alternative instead.

It is possible that you may recommend implementing no solution because all solutions are infeasible or bad in some other way. However, I have never seen this happen and you would probably need a good reason to do it. In the real world, "Do Nothing" should always be looked at as an alternative solution, which would hopefully be removed early during idea selection. In APS112, you also describe the "measures of success", more intensive tests often involving simulation and/or prototyping used to determine which of the three alternatives is best. You are expected to do them and note it in the final presentation. We used to be required to describe measures of success in APS111 (without doing them), but this was removed as a requirement in 2024.

Your idea generation and selection must be described in your CDS, with all ideas typically listed in an appendix. You must describe your final three solutions and describe your reommended solution in more detail. After the CDS is done and graded in APS112, you will revise and send it to your client like the PR. You will then have a third client meeting similar to that after the PR.

Exams (Final Exam, APS111; Midterm, APS112)

Your final exam will be split into two parts: The first consists of 35 multiple-choice questions about all the content in the course. Much of it is best remembered through the design process, including how you did your assignments. There will be a few questions about how to handle a situation on your team. The second part is doing the design process again. You are given a new client statement and must identify most of the things you need to figure out when making the PR, then generate a few ideas and select the best of them. The entire course is good practice for this part. I studied little but did well in both parts of the exam. Since 2025, the final exam has been worth 35% of your APS111 grade (previously 25%).

In APS112, you will write a midterm instead of a final exam⁴. In 2024, it was held the day after the CDS deadline. In 2025, it was held approximately two weeks earlier. Two-thirds of the multiple-choice questions are similar in style to the APS111 exam. There were one or two questions about estimation, and the questions outside the first two-thirds involved Gantt Charts (i.e. scheduling). The midterm is worth 15% of your final grade and the median grade for the 2024 midterm was 60%.

The Preliminary Literature Review (PLR, APS112)

The Preliminary Literature Review is an individual assignment worth 5% of your final mark. It’s a simple worksheet where you do the following:
-Introduce and state your research question
-Link to and cite your source using proper IEEE formatting
-Perform the CRAAP test on your source
-Explain the relationship between your source and the project.

Design Review Gateway (DRG)

This assignment has been removed from the course as of Winter 2025 and its weight redistributed among other assignments.

In mid-March (around 2 weeks before the CDS is due), your team will present its progress on the project, including an overview of the project, changes made during your second client meeting, any challenges your team has faced, and the current status of the project. The point of this presentation is to convince your EM and CI that your project is going well. If you are a design engineer, a failing or below grade would indicate your boss may pull the plug on your project. For this reason, it is crucial to not procrastinate too much on your CDS. You will have an 8-minute time limit (you may be cut off at that time) and the CDS and EM will ask you questions after. Hostile questions are possible.

This presentation is worth 5% of your final mark, the weighting of which will be moved to your final presentation if you do better on it. If you would like to learn more about presentation skills, I can’t remember them right now but I have some material to help. Please contact me if you’d like it.

The Final Presentation (APS112)

Your team’s 20% final presentation is the “final exam” of ESP II, held any time between 9 and 6 on the first day of exams. The table of rooms and times will be posted in advance. Like the DRG, you will have a time limit (this one is 12 minutes). You will be cut off at the limit whether or not you were able to finish. The point of this presentation is to convince your client to implement your design solution or one of your alternatives.

After your presentation, you can be questioned by the CI, EM, the client (if they come), or anyone else in the room. The CI and EM are not the same CI and EM you had throughout the semester, and your client may be the EM if they are part of the teaching team. You are allowed to visit other people’s presentations as long as you aren’t doing your own at that time. In my section, the CI gave two of the three groups who presented hostile questions (my group was spared).

The final presentation is worth 20-25% of your final mark. When we did the DRG, the DRG weight (5%) was redistributed to the final presentation when the group's final presentation mark is better than their DRG grade.

Notes

1. This happened to me last year.
2. The Engineering Manager is a new member of the teaching team for APS112, found in your tutorials. They act as your boss.
3. It was unclear to our team what the exact number was and we forgot to ask during the first meeting. This is not the only reason this can happen (the client may have second thoughts about what they wrote on their client statement, for example)
4. Unless you count the final presentation

This page is partly based on a document I wrote early in December 2024.

Last updated: 09/12/2025