Teach & case
Help a near-peer reason through the idea — when you explain it, you understand it best — then read the real decision it comes from.
Help Sy pick the design
What you've shown you can teach
A real case · you decide
Sy and the bracket that wins on paper
Sy — a student in a design competition where the best strength-to-weight score wins — but any part over the stress limit is disqualified
Sy's bracket has the best strength-to-weight score of every design on the team. It looks like the clear winner. But the rules have a hard line: any part whose peak stress exceeds the material limit is disqualified — and Sy hasn't checked that yet.
A hard constraint is pass/fail, not a score you can trade against. A design that violates it is INFEASIBLE — it doesn't matter how good its objective score is, because it isn't allowed to exist.
So the order matters: first SCREEN every candidate for the hard constraints (does it stay under the stress limit? under the mass cap?), then RANK the survivors by the objective. Optimizing first and checking later can crown a design that was never eligible.
Sy's top-scoring bracket turns out to exceed the max stress at one joint. Should Sy still submit it because it has the best score?
A second design comes in 2% over the mass cap but scores brilliantly. A teammate says "round the mass down, it's basically at the cap." Feasibility-first?
Sy's habit is the whole lesson: screen feasibility first, optimize second. The flashiest design on the board isn't a contender until it's proven it's even allowed to compete.