What We Hope The Year Will Be Like

First day, and he did not hand out a syllabus and read it to us. He put a case on the board, asked what we would need to know to solve it, and let us list things for ten minutes. Then he said the list we just made was the course.

The expectations are short enough to remember. Come in ready, write it down, say where your evidence stops.

That last one is going to come up constantly.

We walked the site: where the day's lesson lives, where the glossary is, where the folder for each kind of work is.

Everything I turn in this semester goes to one of a small number of folders, and now I know which is which.

The part I did not expect was the practice section. It is not extra, it is where the WebXam review lives, and it is open from day two.

Record, Reduce, Review, Reflect, Recite, Revise. We set up the notebook the way it will stay all semester: notes on the right, questions on the left, summary at the bottom.

He made us do the Reduce step on notes we had just taken, which was uncomfortable, because it showed how much of what I wrote down I could not actually say back.

Safety first, and not as a formality. Personal protective equipment, the Safety Data Sheet, and finding the hazard and first aid sections on a real chemical before anyone touched anything. He calls it earning entry to the lab, and that framing works on me.

Then myPLTW logins and a practice submission, so the first real one is not also the first time I have used the system. This course has fewer labs and more builds, so the submission habit matters more, not less.

The pretest is a baseline, not a grade, and he said that before he handed it out and again after. Mine was low and so was everybody's, which was the point.

Then we wrote down a target and one specific habit to get there. Mine is fifteen minutes a night on the practice section. Seventeen weeks to move it.

He opened by saying this course has no answer key, which got a laugh and turned out to be literal. In the other three classes the lab has a right result. Here we define the problem and the only test is whether the thing we build actually addresses it.

That is either exciting or terrifying depending on the hour.

Safety again, because we will be in the lab and also using tools. PPE, the Safety Data Sheet, hazard and first aid sections.

Fourth time I have done a version of this across the pathway and the first time it took under a period, which is its own kind of progress.

A design notebook is different from a lab notebook. It keeps the dead ends. Every idea, including the bad ones, with the date, because the record of what you rejected and why is the thing that proves the final design was a decision rather than the first idea you had.

First real entry. We had to observe something in the world and write down a problem we noticed, without proposing a solution yet.

Not proposing a solution is unbelievably hard. I wrote three problems and all three were secretly solutions wearing a problem costume.

AT HOME, THE NIGHT BEFORE WED FEB 3 Submit setup check Notebook, safety, first entry.

ETHICS DAY Should an emergency room be designed for average speed or for the sickest patient? Optimizing throughput means the median person waits less and the rare complicated one waits much longer.

I argued for throughput because more people benefit. Then somebody said the person who waits longer under my design is the person least able to survive waiting. I did not have an answer.

Everyone affected by the ER, not just patients. Nurses, triage, registration, cleaning staff, families in the waiting room, the ambulance crew who cannot leave until they hand off.

The ambulance handoff is the one nobody in my group had thought of, and it turns out to be a real bottleneck.

Mapping the actual path a patient takes, step by step, with the waits marked. The waits are where the design problem lives.

Our first map had eleven steps and four of them were waiting for information rather than waiting for a person.

AT HOME, THE WEEKEND BEFORE TUE FEB 9 Team contract We wrote and signed an actual team contract: who does what, how we decide when we disagree, and what happens if somebody does not deliver.

It felt over the top on Thursday. It was extremely useful in week four.

A brief naming one specific inefficiency with evidence from our flow map. Not the ER is slow. This step, this wait, this many minutes.

Annotating properly: what the source claims, what evidence it gives, and what it does not cover. Then citing so somebody else can find it.

Writing what a source does not cover is the part I would have skipped and is the part that shows you read it.

Annotated sources with citations and a summary of what we still do not know.

ETHICS DAY Whether a design that helps most patients but disadvantages a specific group is acceptable if the overall numbers improve.

This is Monday of week two again with a sharper edge, because now it is our design.

AT HOME, THE NIGHT BEFORE THU FEB 18 Design brief The brief: problem, users, criteria, constraints. Constraints are the ones people skip and they are what make a design real. Budget, space, staffing, and the fact that you cannot rebuild a hospital.

Our first brief had criteria and no constraints, which meant our design could have been anything.

BUILD First time in CAD. Drawing a floor plan to scale, which immediately kills ideas that worked fine as sketches. Our redesigned triage area did not physically fit.

Scale is a brutal critic. You cannot argue with a wall.

The new patient flow through our redesign, next to the old one, so the improvement is visible rather than claimed.

This is where the team contract paid for itself. Two of us wanted different layouts and we had already agreed how to decide, so it took ten minutes instead of the whole period.

Documenting every change and why. The log is the deliverable, not just the final plan, because the reasoning is what gets assessed.

ETHICS DAY How much testing before a new device reaches patients. Speed against safety, and the people harmed by delay are invisible in a way the people harmed by a bad device are not.

That asymmetry is why this argument never resolves cleanly.

AT HOME, THE NIGHT BEFORE THU FEB 25 Presentation prep Preparing to defend the design. He told us the audience is not there to be impressed, they are there to find the weak point, and our job is to have already found it.

We presented. The question that got us was whether our redesign made the ambulance handoff worse, and it does, slightly. We had not measured it because it was not our focus.

Answering honestly that we had not checked was better than the alternative and still did not feel good.

New problem. Human physiology, and what you can actually measure on a person in a classroom: heart rate, reaction time, grip strength, breathing rate.

A testable question with variables defined. Mine was too broad twice before it was answerable.

ETHICS DAY Measuring classmates and then analyzing the results. Consent, and what happens to the data after.

It is easy to treat consent as a form when the subject is sitting next to you. The point is that it is easier to skip precisely then.

AT HOME, THE NIGHT BEFORE THU MAR 4 Experimental vs observational If you control the variable it is experimental. If you only watch, it is observational and you cannot claim cause.

Almost every claim I have ever repeated from the internet is observational reported as causal.

LAB Sensors on people, multiple trials, units on everything. Our first trials were inconsistent because we were not standardizing rest between them.

The protocol has to control the subject as carefully as the instrument.

Statistics with a purpose. Mean and standard deviation, then a t-test to ask whether two groups actually differ or whether the difference is noise.

Our difference looked convincing in the bar chart and did not survive the test. That was genuinely deflating and completely the point.

Raw data, statistics, and an honest statement that our result was not significant.

ETHICS DAY Fingerprints and face data are different from a password because you cannot change them after a breach.

That permanence is the whole argument and I had never framed it that way.

How the same honest data becomes a different claim depending on axis range, bar versus line, and what you leave out.

He showed us a graph with a truncated y-axis that made a tiny difference look enormous, then the same data drawn properly. Nobody lied and the two pictures say opposite things.

LAB Reanalyzing our week six data properly, with the axis honest and the non-significant result reported as non- significant.

Claim, evidence, reasoning, limitations. My claim had to be that we found no significant difference, which is a real finding and does not feel like one.

ETHICS DAY Whether incremental improvement or radical redesign does more good. Incremental helps sooner and reaches fewer people. Radical might help enormously or might never ship.

Most actual progress is incremental and most attention goes to the radical, which is its own problem.

Defining our own problem, properly, with evidence that it is real and affects specific people.

I brought the pill bottle. Arthritis, childproof caps, and the fact that the people least able to open them are the ones with the most prescriptions. I have wanted to work on this since I was fourteen and this is the first time anyone asked me to.

AT HOME, THE NIGHT BEFORE FRI MAR 19 Design criteria and constraints Criteria are what success looks like, constraints are what you cannot change. Mine include that it still has to be childproof, which is the entire difficulty. Easy for weak hands and hard for curious ones are close to opposite requirements.

AT HOME, THE NIGHT BEFORE FRI MAR 19 Design sprint and tradeoffs Fast sketching, many ideas, then killing most. Every idea traded one requirement against another and the log has to say which trade I made and why.

Problem, evidence, users, criteria, constraints, three concepts, one recommendation.

ETHICS MONDAY Using a company's own research to justify their product, and whether disclosure is enough to fix the conflict.

Finding what already exists. Four products already address my problem and two are quite good, which was deflating for an hour and then useful.

Knowing what exists is how you find the gap instead of rebuilding something.

Scoring concepts against weighted criteria. The weighting is the argument, because whichever criterion you weight heaviest decides the winner before you score anything.

My matrix picked the concept I already liked until I fixed the weights, which is worth knowing about myself.

How would we know if it worked? Actual measurable criteria and who we would test with. Mine has to include people with limited grip strength, because testing on my own hands proves nothing.

AT HOME, THE NIGHT BEFORE WED APR 7 MP1 tracker audit Marking period audit with an honest confidence rating.

ETHICS DAY Why exposure is not evenly distributed, and whether that is an accident of geography or the result of decisions.

This is not abstract in Cleveland and everybody knew it. Quietest and most serious Monday so far.

AT HOME, THE NIGHT BEFORE THU APR 8 Exposure pathway Source, pathway, receptor. You can break the chain at any of the three, and which one you choose is a policy decision disguised as a technical one.

Telling people to stay indoors breaks it at the receptor and leaves the source running.

LAB Real environmental data, multiple sites, comparing against a standard. Some sites exceeded it.

Numbers about places I have been are different from numbers about nowhere.

What would actually reduce exposure, ranked by where in the pathway it acts and what it costs.

The most effective interventions are the most expensive and the slowest, which is why the cheap ineffective ones keep getting chosen.

Map, data, mitigation ranking.

Straight into building the graph that carries our environmental claim. Axis honest, units labeled, standard marked as a reference line.

Week seven is doing real work here. I would have truncated that axis in February without thinking about it.

One paragraph, claim to evidence to reasoning, with the limitation that our sampling was opportunistic rather than random.

Graph and paragraph.

ETHICS MONDAY When a public health measure restricts individual choice for collective benefit, and who decides the threshold.

Building a line list: one row per case, columns for the variables that might matter. The structure is what makes the pattern findable.

Ours was unusable until we agreed on how to record dates, because three of us used three formats.

AT HOME, THE NIGHT BEFORE THU APR 22 Intervention model Modeling what changes if you intervene at different points, and how much you would have to do to matter.

A specific plan with a target, a mechanism, and a measure of success.

ETHICS DAY How much uncertainty to include in a public health message. Too much and nobody acts, too little and you have overstated what you know.

And if you overstate once, the next message is not believed.

Writing for people who are not in this class. Short, accurate, actionable.

My first draft was accurate and useless. It described the risk and never said what to do.

Auditing our own product for what it collects and whether it needs to. The answer for two fields was no, and we had included them because they seemed useful.

Collecting less is a design decision, not a limitation.

AT HOME, THE NIGHT BEFORE THU APR 29 Wireframe build BUILD Sketching screens. Our personas were basically us until a teammate pointed out that neither of us is an older person on a slow connection, and half our features served nobody but ourselves.

Message, wireframes, privacy audit, personas.

ETHICS DAY Releasing an engineered organism, even a beneficial one, and the fact that you cannot recall it afterward.

Irreversibility is the whole argument. Almost everything else we have designed this year can be switched off.

The molecular workflow and where controls sit in it. Positive, negative, and what each one rules out.

ETHICS DAY Containment levels and who is responsible when something leaves a lab. The answer is usually a system rather than a person, which is comforting and also how nobody ends up accountable.

AT HOME, THE NIGHT BEFORE THU MAY 6 Transformation notes Getting bacteria to take up a plasmid, and why only a small fraction do. The selection step is what finds the ones that worked.

LAB The wet lab. Transformation, then a gel to confirm it. My plate had colonies where the control said there should be none, which means contamination somewhere in my technique.

Four courses into this pathway and my aseptic technique is still the weakest thing I do.

Mapping the bands against the ladder to work out fragment sizes. My gel was readable despite the plate problem, which is a small mercy.

Protocol, plate results, gel image, and the contamination written into the limitations rather than quietly omitted.

ETHICS DAY The last Monday. Research ethics, and we were asked to name one position we had changed across the whole year.

Mine was incremental versus radical innovation. I came in wanting to build the dramatic thing. I am leaving convinced that the pill bottle nobody writes articles about is worth more than the device that never ships.

Organizing evidence so somebody else could audit the chain of reasoning. Same discipline as the design log, applied to a different problem.

Defining the final project question, which after seventeen weeks I can now do in one period instead of three.

IN CLASS, FRI MAY 14 Portfolio audit Everything against the rubric. Mine was mostly complete and the gaps were labels and dates, not missing work, which is its own lesson about doing it properly at the time.

IN CLASS, FRI MAY 14 Final portfolio submit Submitted. Seventeen weeks, four design problems, one portfolio.

In January I wrote three problems that were secretly solutions. Today I defended a design with a decision matrix, a validation plan, and an honest list of what I still cannot prove.