Element F: Consideration of Design Viability

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Week 7: Consideration of Design Viability

PLTW Element F — Consideration of Design Viability.

Assess Viability

Before you build, stress-test the design on paper across the dimensions that kill real projects:

Cost viability — can this be built and (if applicable) deployed/hosted within budget?
Manufacturability / buildability — can your team actually construct this with the time and skills available this trimester?
Technical feasibility — are there any unproven assumptions (an API that may not support what you need, a sensor accuracy you haven’t verified) that need a spike before you commit?

Vendor & Material Cost / Bill of Materials

Source real costs for every material, part, or paid service in your Material List (Element E). No placeholder numbers.
Compile a Bill of Materials (BOM): item, vendor/source, quantity, unit cost, total cost.
For software-only builds, this includes hosting tiers, API rate limits/costs, and any paid dependencies.

Timeline of Building & Testing

Lay out a Prototype Timeline: what gets built in what order, and when testing checkpoints happen, through the end of Sprint 2 (Week 8) into Sprint 3.
Turn the timeline into GitHub Issues on your Kanban board with due dates — this is your Engineering Journal timeline, not a static document.

Core Deliverables

Design viability assessment (cost / manufacturability / feasibility).
Bill of Materials with sourced costs.
Build-and-test timeline reflected in your Kanban board.

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