Engineering Success

This page includes a not-very-good sidebar to take you to anchors. In fact the best way to use the site is to follow links from the INDEX page.

Silver Medal Criterion #1

we must demonstrate engineering success in a technical aspect of your project by going through at least one iteration of the engineering design cycle. I think Arvin went through at least one cycle.


Visit the Medals page for more information.

Our basic DBTL problem and its proposed solution


Davy had the problem that high-quality PET plastic is hard to make in orbit. You can break down the plastic into EG and TPA, but when you re-combine those components to make filament for your 3D printer, the filament is usually low-quality. Nico has an AI-powered pipeline that might fix this.

Davy had a problem, Nico has a solution


Engineering success can be achieved by documenting your effort to follow the engineering design cycle: Design → Build → Test → Learn

We invite you to think about ways to tackle and solve one or more of your project's problems and use synthetic biology tools and/or experimental techniques to generate expected results.

When you have completed the cycle once, think about and document what changes in design you would make for the next iteration(s) of the cycle.

Nico actually did this. Nico let Arvin do the first cycle, and then Nico's Awesome Software Tool is a response to unexpected results in the first cycle.

For example, you can design and build a new Part, measure its performance, document whether it worked or not, and propose how the results would inform the next design or steps (documentation must be on the Part's Pages on the Registry).

Visit the Engineering pages for additional guidance on engineering success.

Richard Wu, Maroof, Arvin, and possibly others did work that must be credited


Engineering started with a bunch of non-AEI staff who must be credited properly on the team page.

What did Wet Lab do?


Wet Lab results are almost entirely from Arvin's team. We have to somehow come up with an explanation of how our student wet lab team contributed few if any results.