Powstik Varsity

Design it. Test it. Document it.

Engineering. Design, test and document things that work.

What you'll prove

Varsity

Business & Management Computer Science & Data Health & Medicine Social Sciences, Law & Humanities Natural Sciences Engineering Education & Social Work Creative & Design Sport & Performance Mind & Wellbeing Powstik Incubator Powstik Research

What is the Engineering Department?

The Engineering Department groups the Powstik paths and outcomes on that subject. You build real work and get it checked.

Who is it for?

It is for anyone who wants to learn a subject by doing it. You can start at any level.

What costs money?

Nothing in a Department. Paths, outcomes and checks have no charge.

How does verification work?

A real person who knows your work signs in and checks each proof. You can never check your own proof. Your standing grows as more people check your work.

Varsity curricula

Finish every path in a Program, then pass a blind review of your final project to earn Honors.

Robotics

Nine stages from kinematics to an autonomous robot, free, with a simulation-only route at every step and real work checked by people.

22 milestones · About 57 weeks at about 8 hours a week, plus your capstone trials.

How this works

Use the free textbooks, docs and simulators linked at each stage.
Build each stage in simulation in a public repo, then show it working to a person.
Use a real robot whenever you have one; the simulator always counts.
Finish all nine stages, then pass a blind review of your capstone demo to earn Honors.

Related paths

Optional practice. Not needed for Honors.

No hardware needed: every hardware step can be done in a free simulator.

Start

Programs

Finish every path in a Program, then pass a blind review of your final project to earn Honors.

Innovation

One real project, taken from research to launch to scale.

Applied Innovation Lab

12 milestones

Start

How standing works

Permanent and earned only from verified work. Never bought, applied for or handed out. Separate from the weekly team league.

Member
Joined any path in this Department.
Varsity Letter
5 verified outcomes here, each checked by 3 different people.
Honors
Complete a Program, then pass a blind review of its final project by Faculty you didn't choose.
Opens as Faculty join

Faculty

People who check others' work in this Department.

No Faculty in this Department yet. Seats fill as people verify work here.

Powstik paths in Engineering

BeginnerGrades 6-8

Middle School Maker

For grades 6–8: go from consumer to creator

SkillsCreativeLearningGovernance

0 required + 6 opt36w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Software Engineering Foundations

Software engineering is not coding — it's the discipline of building systems that work under real constraints. Every proof here is a real engineering artifact.

Skills

2 required + 3 opt36w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Mechanical Engineering

Mechanical engineering starts with a drawing. FreeCAD is free and open-source. SimScale has a free FEA tier. You don't need a machine shop to prove you can engineer.

Skills

1 required + 4 opt44w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Electrical & Electronics Engineering

From circuit analysis to embedded firmware. LTspice and Falstad run in your browser. Wokwi simulates Arduino without hardware. Every proof is a schematic, simulation result, or documented test.

Skills

1 required + 6 opt52w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Civil & Structural Engineering

Civil engineering proofs are calculations that keep things standing. SkyCiv has a free tier. BGS and USGS geological data are publicly available. The proof is the calculation, not the construction.

Skills

1 required + 4 opt44w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Chemical & Process Engineering

Chemical engineering is mass balances, energy balances, and not blowing things up. DWSIM is free and open-source. Every proof is a calculation, diagram, or safety analysis reviewed by a process engineer.

Skills

2 required + 3 opt44w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Environmental Engineering

Environmental engineering meets contaminated sites, polluted rivers, and waste streams. EPA design manuals are free. Superfund data is public. The proof is the design calculation.

Skills

1 required + 6 opt52w

ExpertPostgraduate

Engineering Management

Engineering management requires understanding what engineers actually build and why projects fail. ProjectLibre is free. Defend your analysis to a manager who has lived through the failure modes.

Skills

1 required + 3 opt36w

AdvancedGrades 9-12

Applied Innovation Lab

Discover. Build. Deepen. Scale.

SkillsGovernance

4 required80w

Advanced

Robotics & Embedded AI

Build a robot that senses, thinks on-device and acts on its own.

Skills

3 required + 3 opt24w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Robotics 1: Foundations

Frames, transforms and kinematics, in code you can test.

Skills

1 required5w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Robotics 2: Build

Sensors, actuators, power and firmware — on a board or in Wokwi.

Skills

2 required + 1 opt10w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Robotics 3: Robot software

ROS 2 nodes and a simulated robot that moves on command.

Skills

1 required5w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Robotics 4: Perception

See the world: vision, depth and knowing where you are.

Skills

1 required + 1 opt6w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Robotics 5: Planning & control

PID, path and motion planning, and picking things up.

Skills

1 required6w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Robotics 6: Robot learning

Teach a robot with reinforcement learning or demonstrations, then cross the sim-to-real gap.

Skills

1 required + 1 opt6w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Robotics 7: Embodied foundation models

Fine-tune an open vision-language-action policy on your own data.

Skills

1 required6w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Robotics 8: Safety, ethics & field testing

Find what can go wrong, guard against it, and test outside the lab.

Skills

1 required4w

AdvancedUndergraduate

Robotics 9: Capstone

An autonomous robot task, demoed live and defended.

Skills

1 required9w

BeginnerGrades 6-12

Robotics for Grades 6–12: Start in a Simulator

Make a robot sense and react — free, in your browser.

SkillsLearning

1 required4w

Outcomes

Milestone map

Ship and Sustain a Reliable Service

4 milestones · 12 weeks

Set real SLOs for critical services, measure the actual reliability gap against them, then close it and defend the change to a panel of practitioners.