Mnemonic phrases may help engineering students remember list information more easily. This paper describes the current progress of work to develop, implement and test two methods for the automatic generation of mnemonic phrases by computer. Techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) are drawn upon; more specifically from natural language processing (NLP) and genetic algorithms (GA). The first method approaches mnemonic phrase generation directly using NLP; the second approaches it as an optimisation problem to be solved by GA.