Praxis III Showcase

Faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends are invited to see what EngSci’s Praxis III students have been up to.

This year’s Praxis III students worked on projects based in Canada and the African Continent.

Student teams collaborated with peers from U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science and focused on design challenges aligned with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 7, 11, 13, and 15 grouped into two broad areas:

• Improving Sustainability and Energy Management in Buildings on the African Continent
• Wildland Fire Protection & Mitigation in a Canadian Context

At the Praxis III Showcase, you’ll interact with student teams as they present and demonstrate their designs. You’ll learn about their innovative ideas for using engineering to address challenges for stakeholders around the world.

Teams in Praxis III choose from a curated set of opportunity areas that integrate technical, complementary, and optionally, multidisciplinary, considerations. They are responsible both for framing a specific opportunity within their chosen area and for developing a valid design idea for the opportunity supported by a mechatronic prototype.

Through their design work, students collectively provide an array of possible design options which each provide value in the context of their opportunity. In this way, Praxis III continues to foster the EngSci motto, Engineers for the World (E4TW):

“[O]ur goal is to educate engineers who seek to solve the world’s most critical problems; have compassion for the human condition; want to collaborate with people across multiple disciplines, cultural backgrounds and ‘thought perspectives’ to achieve a better world; and encourage technological progress that improves life for citizens across the globe.”

The course consists of three phases:

Prototyping Bootcamp (January): Students develop prototyping skils and engage in individual reflection.

Conceptual Design (February): Students begin work on their design dossier and participate in design critique and individual reflection.

Build & Demonstrate (March – April): Students create their prototypes and iterate on their designs.

Read about a previous Praxis III Showcase in the U of T Engineering News.