1) Experimental aspects: what are the building elements for creating chemically fueled assemblies? This question aimed to drive students to look for the basic compositional elements for construting dissipative assemblies. What is the precondition to make the experiment work? This question aimed to drive the students to think of the requirements of the reaction rates in the reaction cycles (i.e. the activation reaction must be faster than deactivation reactions) which logically requires the students to understand reaction kinetics in physical chemistry. Through reverse-engineering the project, the group could break down the big project to fundamental principles in organic chemistry and physical chemistry, these basic pieces was recombined to 160 successfully produce the kinetic models for this project (Figure ). The students firstly determined the rate equations by analyzing and identifying the mechanisms of activation and deactivation reaction in the reaction cycle. Then kinetic models were built for data fitting and MATLAB codes were produced for the data correlation. Based on the first turn of sucessful data fitting, they further found that a simplified model with a steady state approximation could also be used to fit this set of data nicely. Moreover, they For project 2, we aimed to build the experimental project on the understanding of the basic principles in organic chemistry. As this group of students from France did not have any experience in research projects or PBL and had no clue to create a synthetic route for synthesizing the targeting compound, the project was thus broken down and reframed to 3 sub-problems by us to help them work out the synthetic route. Jigsaw technique was employed to enable the generation of the synthetic route by this group. The jigsaw technique is a collaborative learning strategy where students are divided into small groups to work on specific assignments . These groups are then reshuffled into mixed groups. Each person in the groups teaches the rest of the group what he/she knows to complete a comprehensive task, integrating all the pieces to form a complete understanding, like a jigsaw puzzle. Jigswa techniques have been proved effective in chemistry education . Specifically, in this small PBL group, each student was assigned to solve one individual sub-problem through self-study and the basic organic chemistry principles. One student was assigned to work on how to make amide bond and its reaction mechanism, the second strudent worked on the basic protection/deprotection concept and the protection/deprotection methods in peptide synthesis, and the third student focused on the chemistry and mechanism to transform the carboxylate group into aldehyde group (Figure The major aim in the supervision of the two student groups was to drive the student to go deeper the fundamental principles of organic reaction mechanism beneath the empirical project and find new solutions other than to develop experimental techniques in PBL.