Praxis II is a continuation of Praxis I. In this course, you will apply the processes and concepts you learned last semester to improve the lived experience of a community in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Even more so than Praxis I, Praxis II is all about teamwork. You will be divided into teams in the third week, and the rest of Praxis II will be based on team activities.
Your first team project is to construct a community profile where you meet with and analyze a specific community’s baseline conditions and trends. After that comes the true heart of Praxis II. After identifying an engineering opportunity based around a specific community, you will create a Request for Proposal (RFP), which is like the design brief from Praxis I, except far more detailed. The teaching team will then select around 8-10 RFPs to share with the entire class, and your team will choose one of these RFPs and develop a solution for it.
Next, you’ll prototype, test, and document your solution. The difference from Praxis I is that now, the possibilities are much more open-ended. Your concepts can range from physical products to software or something else altogether. Most importantly, you are expected to make much more informed design decisions and perform much more rigorous verification. You’ll also get to take your solution to stakeholders in your community and ask them for feedback. At the end of the course, you’ll present and defend your chosen solution to the teaching team at a public event called “Showcase”. You can view previous Praxis II design projects on the Praxis II Showcase website.
Professors
Professor Roger Carrick
Professor Jennifer Lofgreen
The instructors for Praxis II are Professor Jennifer Lofgreen and Professor Roger Carrick, whom you will recognize from ESC101 Praxis I.
Course Highlights
- Cold-calling businesses, companies, and communities. It can be awkward at first, but you’ll quickly become a pro and discover that it isn’t actually all that hard. This is a super useful skill that you can use for job searching and networking later too.
- Praxis II encourages you to explore Toronto! You will go out into the GTA, meet new people, and learn new perspectives. You will be pushed out of your comfort zone in a good way.
- Prototyping and testing your solutions. Not only will you learn CAD software called OnShape, but your design concepts can also be literally anything you want – as long as you can support all of your design decisions with research and verification.
- Praxis II Showcase! Local media have sometimes attended and featured students in their newspaper or on the radio. It is extremely fun to present and observe other teams doing the same.
Week in the Life of a Praxis I Student
Like in Praxis I, the weeks in Praxis II can vary significantly. Here is a rough approximation of how a week will look for a Praxis II student.
Classes
There are typically three lectures a week for Praxis II. You will learn about engineering design concepts and participate in design and thinking activities. You’ll find that the lectures are very well-integrated with the tutorials. Professors will often discuss some notable results from tutorial activities and connect them to different engineering design concepts. Additionally, some lectures will focus on engineering design tools that will be useful in the tutorial sections immediately following the lecture.
Praxis studios occupy the same section in your schedule as tutorials. In a small class led by a couple TAs, you will be guided through engineering design activities, project help, and more. This is where most of your project-specific work and instruction will happen. Similar to Praxis I, you’ll find that the concepts discussed in studios were introduced in the lectures. This makes studios an excellent time to apply these concepts and get a deeper understanding of how they all work together.
Similar to Praxis I, your timetable contains a 2-hour practical block during which you can meet with your team and work on your project. While the meeting time and duration is not mandatory, you should schedule regular meeting times with your team. Since Praxis is a dynamic course, you may have no meetings on some weeks, and many hours of meetings on other weeks. The key is to find times that work for your entire team, and to not leave all your work until the last minute.
We cannot emphasize enough the importance of regularly checking in with your team. Note that the workload in Praxis II significantly increases from Praxis I, so be prepared for a lot of teamwork. Through regular team communication, you can keep track of deadlines and allocate work more effectively. Communicating with your team helps ensure that everyone is healthy and offers an opportunity to de-stress all together.
Individual Assessments
In place of a final exam, there are two final independent assessments in Praxis II: the Engineering Handbook and the Student Engineer Portfolio.
The handbook summarizes your personal engineering design process you developed throughout Praxis I, Praxis II and any extracurricular design activities in first year. In it, you include examples of engineering design tools, models, and frameworks that supported this process. This handbook will be very useful in your future design courses, including Praxis III in second year.
The portfolio is a chance for you to reflect upon your engineering design work throughout first year and understand how your positionality affected/was affected by your design work. Furthermore, it offers you an opportunity to flex your engineering muscles and describe all your skills and abilities which went into these projects. Note that many companies allow prospective engineers to submit a design portfolio to display some of their work, so this assignment can be a valuable asset in the future.
These assignments will be due on the same day, right after showcase, and right in the middle of exam season. As such, we strongly recommend that you do not leave these to the last minute. You should work on these throughout the semester. Every so often, take some time to write a page in your handbook or record some notes about what you have learned throughout the Praxis II project.
Group Assessments
You will spend most of your time in Praxis II working in one group. You will write the community profile, RFP, and complete the Showcase project in this group. However, there will be some individual assignments. In addition to the handbook and portfolio, your first two assignments, the community profile and positionality statement, will be independent.
How to Succeed
Nearly all the tools you used in Praxis I will be used in Praxis II. We have listed some more tools specific to Praxis II below.
More Details
This basically means understanding what people’s body language conveys. For example, if someone keeps checking their watch while speaking with you, it could mean they are running late for something but don’t want to cut you off. This skill is useful when interacting with stakeholders.
Your team can get caught up in small details; though discussion and debate are at the heart of Praxis, ask yourself if your team’s decision will affect your design’s use and function or your ability to defend your design. If there is little impact, aim to conclude the debate by picking one of the possible options. If done correctly, it’s fine to say, “This part of the design was not significant, so we simply picked one option.”
Planning is crucial in Praxis II: there’s a lot to do and there’s limited time. Being a skilled planner will help you immensely in the course.
You should have a high-level plan before you begin working. At the beginning of each task, quickly summarize what you want to achieve and your plan to achieve it. This is especially useful when justifying your design. If you plan your argument step-by-step, you’ll have a much easier time writing clearly and concisely.
However, don’t over plan! Sometimes a detailed plan is unnecessary since you know what you’re doing. Conversely, if you’ve never done the task before, you won’t know what to include in your plan. In these cases, try to work a little first to get an idea of how long something takes or the type of work it requires – then make your plan.
In high school, you may have been used to your teacher ignoring or going easy on any obvious mistakes or weaknesses in your project if the rest of it was good. In Praxis II, the markers’ job is to be critical of your design and design process, so if there’s a clear weakness, they will ask you to address it. Thus, it’s your job to have a well-rounded design that you can fully support. If your team seems to be ignoring something about your design, bring their attention to it. Think about situations in which the design can fail, and then build some arguments for why those situations are unlikely. A little self-criticism goes a long way in Praxis!
Praxis II is a course that really benefits from your engagement and enjoyment of the work. Since you have a lot of choices in picking your engineering opportunity, look for communities and situations that you’re personally interested in and care about. Having a genuine interest in your work will help you in lots of ways, especially by motivating you to do the little extra research or experimentation that can turn your design from good to great.
Throughout the semester, you will be given feedback from TAs and profs through many different mediums. This includes activities during studios, TA meetings, and “holistic” or written feedback on assignments. Feedback is personalized and is designed to help you become a better student engineer, so don’t neglect these resources.
You will be working with the same team for four months, so get to know them. What do they like? What do they dislike? Do they have pets? Why are they late every day? Did they commute in the morning? What do they want to get out of this team? What are your team goals? The key to individual success in Praxis is to be successful as a team.
Praxis II is one of the most unique and engaging courses you will take during your first year in Engineering Science. The amount of trust and responsibility given to students is almost unparalleled. Enjoy your time in Praxis II and try to get the most out of it! You could learn skills that you use throughout your life.
What Will You Take Out of It?
- Like Praxis I, Praxis II gives you the opportunity to turn your personal interests into engineering opportunities. You will have the opportunity to do what you excel at or to learn something brand new!
- You will get the opportunity to build on and apply the Engineering Design principles taught in Praxis I, including the FDCR principle and Toulmin model of arguments.
- In Praxis II, there’s more time to spend on prototyping and testing. Use the course as an opportunity to pick up some hardware or software skills.
- You’ll be designing a solution for an opportunity to support a community. This is a great way to learn about the human components of engineering, like communicating with your stakeholders, accounting for accessibility, and verifying your design.
- The design skills gained in this course will serve as a basis for second-year EngSci courses such as ESC204 as well as upper-year design courses in almost all of the majors.
Praxis Showcase in the News
Media have attended some of the Praxis Showcase events. The stories in the links below detail some of the past student projects.
