Proposal Resources

So, you’ve signed up for Apex! That’s great! This guide will help you get started with brainstorming an idea for your team’s project and putting together a proposal to submit to the Apex team.

Step 1: Form a team

Putting together a proposal, designing a project, and building it is no easy task. For that reason, the Apex team strongly recommends that you form teams of 2-5 people. While it’s not impossible to do it by yourself, working with a team will not only be a lot easier on you, but it will also be a lot more fun!

If you already have a team, that’s great! Make sure everyone signs up for Apex individually, and when it comes time to submit a proposal, make sure to include everyone’s names.

If you don’t already have a team (or would like more members), that’s also great! Talk around in the #apex channel on the Hack Club Slack, and you’ll find someone cool to work with on your Apex project :)

Step 2: IDEAS!

Here’s your situation: you’ve signed up, you’ve got a team, but you’re missing an idea. (Or, you’ve already got an idea for your project - if that’s the case, continue to Step 3.)

Step 2A: Go crazy

When designing a project to launch on a high-altitude weather balloon, the sky’s really the limit! While there are many technical constraints outlined in Step 2B, don’t worry about those right now. For now, just thing of anything and everything that could possibly yield interesting results if launched 100,000ft into the air.

If you need some inspiration, here’s some ideas others have had. We encourage you to make your project your own, though:

• 🫧 Ozone sensor
• ☀️ Solar tracker
• ⚡️ Ambient static electricity collector
• 🧪 Chemistry experiment

You’ll notice a common theme among several ideas: they log various kinds of data. There’s a lot to find out about what happens at high elevations!

Step 2B: Explore each idea in detail

You should now have a decently long list of potential project ideas. Now, it’s time to enhance. Get into the details of each idea! You’ll probably find that a couple ideas are simply too impractical (take a look at the project limitations). You might be able to change the concept slightly to make it better, or you might just have to scrap it. Other ideas might sound good, but you have no idea how to make it happen. Don’t worry! <insert your favorite search engine here> and the #apex channel on Slack are your best friends, and at least one of them will be able to point you in the right direction.

Keep in mind that you do not need to actually design anything for your project at this step. This step is purely to narrow down your list to just a couple promising ideas that your team would like to build.

Once you’ve narrowed down the list, if you’ve just got one idea left, great! Proceed to the next step. If you’ve got multiple promising ideas left, that’s awesome too! The deciding factor for what project you end up building will ultimately be which one sounds more fun to your team.

Step 3: Writing a proposal

You’ve made it a long way. You’ve formed a team, you’ve brainstormed ideas, and now you’ve narrowed down those ideas to one that you’d really like to make. Before you jump straight into designing and building, though, your team must write a proposal. Don’t worry, it doesn’t need to be an essay! In short, the proposal is for two things:

• Letting the Apex team know what you’re building and making sure it’s within the technical limitations
• Helping your team to describe your project with detail so that you have a clear goal when designing and building

With that said, here are the guidelines for the proposal:

• It should include the names of each member of your team
• It should have a project title
• It should breifly describe what the project will look like and what you expect from it (like a hypothesis)
• It should list the data that will be collected from the project
• It should give a rough idea of how the project will be constructed (components, electronics?)
• It should disclose any concerns about the project, such as potential safety issues or expensive components
  • Note that we may be able to fund a portion of the experiment, but not all of it. If it is a PCB, check out OnBoard!

Make sure to think through each element of this proposal carefully. It’s OK if there’s still parts about the project that you’re unsure of - just include that in the proposal so that we can help you figure it out.

When your team has finished the proposal, submit it on the Proposal Submission Form! Proposals are due on April 1st.