Explore how you work, what you have practised, and what you want to develop next.
Engineering Compass is a bilingual self-reflection tool for engineering learners, from first-year students to experienced project teams. It brings together six competencies, nine technical experience areas, and practical next steps in a personal profile.
Its current celestial-navigation interface keeps the interactive compass at the centre, with a layered star field and slowly drifting engineering worlds adding depth around the assessment journey.
Open Engineering Compass → · Browse the source
English / 繁體中文 · No account required · Responses stay in your browser · Full results PDF
- Choose Standard or Pro.
- Select your undergraduate year, or skip this optional step.
- Answer one question at a time. Go back, switch language, or resume saved progress in the same browser.
- Explore your current strengths, technical experience, and chosen growth directions.
- Save the complete profile as a PDF, or share or download a compact role card with a QR link back to the site.
The questions use plain language. You do not need formal engineering project or presentation experience to answer the behavioural items.
Answer choices without a natural sequence are shuffled once for each attempt to reduce order bias. Ordered scales and experience levels stay in their meaningful sequence, and Other / not sure yet stays last. The chosen order is saved with unfinished progress, so it does not move when you resume.
Answer tiles appear after a brief pause. If several answers are entered unusually quickly, a reminder lets the learner either review the current answer or keep it and continue.
| Standard | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | A quick reflection on how you work and your technical experience | A deeper reflection on decisions and experience from specific tasks |
| Questions | 30 | 60 |
| Typical time | 8–10 minutes | About 18–25 minutes |
| Core profile | Six competencies + nine technical areas | The same core profile |
| Additional reflection | Two engineering-judgment scenarios | Also includes 12 team-decision trade-offs and 18 practice-evidence items |
| Results | Current modes, experience scope, strengths, and next steps | All Standard results, plus decision feedback and practice-evidence reflections |
Pro adds context, not extra points. Its additional questions do not change the Standard core scores. Team decisions offer two or three defensible approaches with different benefits and costs, rather than a textbook “best answer.”
Study year is optional and never changes your scores.
Behaviour questions use a five-point frequency scale. Technical questions use a separate experience and independence scale. Language switching preserves your answers.
The summary connects a leading current mode with experience scope and a next step. Exact displayed-score ties can produce joint modes; equal scores across all six dimensions produce a balanced profile.
Classic results present one approved character for each role. Some exact multi-competency ties can reveal one of ten hidden roles. Hidden-role discoveries, including the competencies involved, are saved only in the current browser and appear in the home-page gallery.
The compact role card keeps the role name, four-letter Engineering Compass code, relevant competency, current experience scope, illustration, and a QR link back to the public site. It does not include individual answers or Technical Toolkit ratings.
Hidden roles to discover
Ten hidden roles represent exact ties between multiple leading competencies. They begin as silhouettes in the browser-only gallery and are revealed when a matching result is discovered.
The radar shows six competencies. The Technical Toolkit shows nine separate self-ratings. Pro practice evidence adds context underneath; it is not averaged into the toolkit score.
These screenshots use synthetic example responses, not student data. Your results depend on your own answers.
Engineering Compass is designed for both desktop and mobile browsers. Learners can complete the assessment, review their illustrated role profile, save the complete results as a PDF, and download or share a compact role card directly from a phone.
| Choose a version | Complete the assessment | Save your full profile |
|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
The mobile screenshots also use synthetic example responses.
These are current ways of contributing, not fixed personality types or assigned team positions. Each role connects to one competency; the illustrations are visual representations, not part of scoring.
 Problem Framer Understand what is happening before choosing what to solve. Problem Identification |
 Project Navigator Turn an idea into a practical plan with steps, priorities, and dependencies. Proposal with Plan |
 Team Connector Help people with different skills coordinate their work and understand each other. Interdisciplinary Collaboration |
 Practical Builder Bring practical technical experience to building, testing, and troubleshooting. Hands-on Skills |
 Prototype Explorer Try ideas in a simple form, learn from tests, and improve what you make. Design Thinking & Prototyping |
 Solution Storyteller Explain an idea clearly, including its value, evidence, and limitations. Pitch for Engineering Solutions |
- Six competencies: self-reported ways of working, not an objective ability test.
- Technical Toolkit: experience and independence across mechanical assembly, CAD, digital fabrication, electronics, programming, physical computing, sensors/data/IoT, AI/computer vision, and system integration.
- Current Experience Scope: Exploring, Building, Practising, or Integrating. An approximate summary of reported projects, responsibilities, and technical experience—not a qualification or seniority level.
- Practice evidence (Pro): tasks you report doing, not independently verified evidence or additional ability points.
- Growth directions: actions to consider for your next learning task or project.
Engineering Compass supports formative reflection. It is not a validated assessment, grade, professional certification, or tool for ranking students. Small score differences should not determine team roles.
Five competencies each use the mean of three behavioural responses. Hands-on Skills uses the mean of the nine Technical Toolkit responses. Each toolkit area also retains its own rating.
Profile score = round(((mean response - 1) / 4) × 100)
Study year, interests, growth choices, and judgment scenarios do not change the radar scores. Project count and responsibility inform the separate experience-scope heuristic, not the competency scores. See scoring, role and scope interpretation, and Pro interpretation for implementation details.
- Answers and unfinished progress remain in local browser storage; the app does not submit them to a server.
- There is no account, class dashboard, or student ranking system.
- Saved progress is tied to that browser and device. Clearing browser storage can remove it.
- PDF generation happens in your browser. It includes the complete results, including Pro reflections when applicable, and uses a fixed-width layout with a side-by-side summary card on phones and desktops.
- The optional role-sharing card contains the role name, four-letter role code, competency labels, illustration, and a QR link to the public site. It does not include individual answers or the Technical Toolkit.
- The PDF contains your profile information. Share it only if you want others to see it.
The site is delivered through GitHub Pages; “browser-only responses” describes assessment answers, not the hosting provider's ordinary handling of website requests.
Built with React, TypeScript, vinext/Vite, Tailwind CSS, Recharts, and Lucide icons. PDF export uses html-to-image and jsPDF. The deployed application is a static site.
Use Node.js 24.
npm ci
npm run devnpm test
npm run lint
npx tsc --noEmit
npm run buildStatic output is written to dist/client. The GitHub Pages workflow checks and deploys pushes to main.
| Location | Contents |
|---|---|
| app/page.tsx | Home, study-year step, assessment flow, and results |
| app/globals.css | Visual system, responsive layouts, and export styling |
| lib/assessment | Questions, scoring, interpretation, saved drafts, and PDF export |
| lib/i18n | English and Traditional Chinese messages with stable translation keys |
| public/modes | Approved transparent geometric illustrations for the six classic and ten hidden roles |
| docs/hidden-role-art-direction.md | Role definitions, competency mappings, and final visual requirements for ten hidden roles |
| tests/assessment.test.mjs | Question, language, scoring, interpretation, and export regression checks |
| docs | Design notes and assessment development history |
The current question sets are Standard v1.8 / Pro v0.4. Older documents mentioning a Pro pilot describe development history; the current interface presents Standard and Pro. Revisions that change question meanings are versioned so older drafts are not silently reinterpreted. Passing software tests does not establish assessment validity.
The software code is available under the MIT License. The assessment questions, interpretations, written content, Engineering Compass name and branding, screenshots, and role illustrations are not covered by that software licence; they remain all rights reserved unless a file states otherwise. See CONTENT-NOTICE.md before reusing the assessment or its visual assets.