Engineering Strategies & Practice
Many first-year engineering students struggle with APS111/112, and keeping your mindset in check is especially important here.
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.
Projects are usually not related to your discipline. They are designed with the idea that you do not have any technical knowledge. As a result, you will often get projects about redesigning spaces, which do not require much technical knowledge apart from reading some more well-known standards manuals.
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.
Good team leadership and a good team charter go a long way. Having early internal deadlines will ensure you have a buffer if something bad happens (perhaps even assume something will happen, having bad teammates is a real possibility), and will allow you to more thoroughly review your work before handing it in. Regular meetings and progress updates (the latter are assessed in APS112) will additionally ensure you have time to discuss your work and seek input from the entire team, as well as an additional deadline for progress you can discuss. You can additionally have work sessions with your team as part of meetings (good for groups which are better at working with each other around). The length of meetings is up to you, my APS112 team had two meetings every week (one in-person midweek, the other virtual on the weekend) with discussion and a work session. I recommend not skipping these, my APS111 group did this and screwed itself over as a result. You may additionally need to meet with your team to prepare for client meetings or the final presentation, or put the finishing touches on an assignment before the deadline.
The "RNG factor"
Most students who talk about this course mention that it is "very RNG". This is partly true. However,
you should focus on things you can control,
which in my view encompass the majority of grade variance in the course.
You will not do as well if you focus on things you can not control, as you may neglect what you can control.
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). Dealing with bad teammates is difficult (perhaps very difficult), but understanding
the impact and planning for it can help a lot. My APS112 project requirements went well despite a good team member's severe
illness because we planned around it.
-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
Engineering Observation (EO, APS111)
This individual APS111 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). This assignment is worth 5% of your APS111 grade (formerly 7.5%), and if you are not accustomed to engineering writing you may perform very poorly on it (like I did).
The Preliminary Literature Review (PLR, APS112)
The Preliminary Literature Review is an individual assignment worth 5% of your final grade.
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.
You do not need to sweat it too much, I remember overthinking this assignment initially. Find a question that you think you can find good sources on, discuss it with your team to prevent overlap between group members, and try finding sources. Since you are evaluating a source, the source being good is not a requirement.
Team Charter (TC)
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. Never avoid having meetings and/or work sessions outside class time. Perhaps you can skip one meeting if it is scheduled immediately around a midterm exam (or during reading week), but you should meet at least twice outside tutorial each week. You should get to know your team mates at least a little before determining all of this. Tell your teammates about your boundaries (e.g. not working past a certain time of day). This will be important to ensuring the ways of working fit within all team members' boundaries, reducing the risk of major problems emerging.
In my first year (2023-24), we were allowed to pick roles during APS111 and APS112. The next year, this was reduced to just APS112. I personally do not like this change, my dislike of my team leader's handling of their role convinced me to try out leading a team during the winter term (to pretty good results). Not everyone is a good leader, and having a secondary leader is a good contingency. If you think you can lead well, you should become the team leader or project manager. That way, you can avoid having a bad team leader. The team being apathetic on that can often lead to the wrong person becoming team leader. Like for the team leader/project manager, other roles such as communication liaison and editor should be picked based on how each team member should contribute.
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. Do not suggest any solutions here. That is for later. The PR sets the boundaries and goals of your project. What does your project need to do? What must it not do? What would be good but not needed? Select these such that you have as great a pool of potential solutions as possible and allowed by your client. Do not exclude "dumb" solutions either, they may end up being useful (as I learned in APS112, and again after a second-year project). When writing, ensure you have all the essential information before you start trying to cut things. Think about what will matter for your project.
Apart from 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!). Starting in 2025, the quiz also has five multiple-choice questions about these concepts. To study for the quiz, I recommend practicing on a different project (e.g. a previous year's client statement) and reviewing the terminology.
In 2024, students were required to write a completed problem statement. This change was reversed in 2025, presumably due to the negative effects of doing it that way.
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? For the "how", you would need to list a small number of steps (3 to 5). This does not involve how well your design achieves its primary use, that is where objectives and constraints come 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. I thought of a silly idea in APS112, then it was included in our final recommendation and our client really liked it. In second year, I thought was unreasonable to convert a particular one-way road to two-way operation for buses exiting a bus loop, only for that to be implemented several months later.
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 some 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%). This assignment is easier if you do not have a good team, but it still requires you to understand what you can control and commit to acting accordingly.
It is important you explain the situation completely (as best as you can within 600 words), which will allow you to analyze it fully and come up with a solution honestly. I was docked marks on the Teamwork Analysis for neglecting to mention a detail which may have changed my recommendation slightly had it been considered. 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 to get rid of less desirable ideas 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 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 formerly done during the term, 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. 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.
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 necessarily 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.
Items removed from the course
A few assignments have been removed from Engineering Strategies & Practice since I took it. I have moved them away from the main section to avoid confusion, but am keeping it to discuss my own thoughts on the teaching team's removal decisions.
Perusall Readings (Formerly part of APS111)
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.
These readings were a bit useful for learning, but the nature of our schedules meant the typical reader tried to finish it as quickly as possible (by gaming the system).
Design Review Gateway (DRG, formerly part of APS112)
In mid-March (around 2 weeks before the CDS is due), teams presented their progress on the project, including an overview of the project, changes made during the second client meeting, any challenges the team has faced, and the current status of the project. The point of this presentation was to convince your EM and CI that your project was 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 was crucial to not procrastinate too much on the CDS. The presentation had 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 was worth 5% of your grade, the weighting of which would be moved to the final presentation if the team did better on it.
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
The original version of this page was based on a document I wrote early in December 2024. It has been revised several times since.
Last updated: 08/01/2026