The course involves undertaking and completing a series of design tasks in either civil or environmental engineering depending on whether students are undertaking the civil or environmental stream. The design tasks are chosen in one of the following areas: structural engineering, geotechnical engineering, project management, transport, environmental and/or water engineering. Each design task in the series may be independent of each other, or may be a sequence of related sub-tasks as part of a larger goal.

Assessment of each task requires the construction of working system to solve a specified problem.