ESC102: Praxis II

Photo by Med Badr Chemmaoui on Unsplash

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 first one or two weeks of the course, and the rest of Praxis II will be based on team activities.

At the beginning of the course, your first team project is to construct a community profile where you meet with and analyze a specific community’s baseline conditions and trends. This is both a super informational project and an important one: it will set the stage for the rest of your semester with your team. After that, the meat of the course kicks off. First, you will search for an engineering opportunity in the GTA based around a specific community. You will then develop it into a Request for Proposal (RFP) by framing it, determining objectives and metrics, and outlining the opportunity. The instructors and teaching team will then select around 8-10 RFPs to share with the entire class. Your team will choose one of these RFPs and develop a solution for it.

This means you’ll prototype, test, and document your solution. The difference between this part of Praxis I and Praxis II is that you will need verification for your design. This means you get to take your solution to stakeholders in your community and say, “Hey, look! We made this for the community. What do you think?” At the end of the course, you’ll present and defend your solution to some teaching team members at a public event called “Showcase”. You can view previous Praxis II design projects on the Praxis II Showcase website.

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Professors

Professor Jennifer Lofgreen [Source]

Professor Lofgreen, who goes by Jenny, completed her PhD in Chemistry at U of T, while working on a writing instruction for chemistry students and TAs. In fact, she used to be a TA herself for this course! She spent the past eight years in Sweden teaching academic writing for PhD students. During her time there she started a second PhD that focuses on integrating research into engineering education. She focuses on the communication half of Praxis II – which is all about arguments and building strong opinions!

Professor Interview

Check out our interview with Prof. Carrick and Prof. Lofgreen below where you can learn more about what to expect in Praxis II.

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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 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.
  
  

• Learning how to ask questions to get answers. This sounds straightforward but is surprisingly difficult.
  
  
• Practice reading people! 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 very useful when it comes to speaking with stakeholders.
  
  
• Prototyping and testing your solutions. You’ll continue to apply what you learned in Praxis I.
  
  
• Praxis II Showcase! Local media have sometimes attended and featured students in their newspaper or on the radio.

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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.

Lectures

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.

Studios (Tutorials)

Praxis studios occupy the same section in your schedule as tutorials. In a small class led by TAs, you will be guided through engineering design activities, project help, team building activities, and more. This is where most of your project-specific work and instruction will happen. Tutorials in Praxis II offer an excellent opportunity to ask questions about your project to TAs.

Like in 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.

Assessments

There is one final assessment in Praxis II: the Engineering Handbook. This handbook summarizes the 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 work that support this process. This handbook will be very useful in your future design courses, including Praxis III in second year.

Projects and Reports

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. The Positionality Statement assignment involves writing about your values, interests, and beliefs. This assignment and the Engineering Handbook are both done individually.

Team Meetings

In Praxis II, you need to meet with your team regularly. In our year, we had a two-hour slot in our timetable that was dedicated to team meetings. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of regularly checking in with your team. 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.

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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

Save Time by Seeing the Big Picture

Your team can get caught up in small details regarding report writing or testing. 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.”

Plan Efficiently and Effectively

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 overplan! 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.

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