Reaction All Years

Project Description:

Our client, Wishplay has been expertly administering joyful virtual reality experiences since 2017. Wishplay began with founder David Parker volunteering in hospitals to grant last wishes in virtual reality to palliative patients. More recently, Wishplay started bringing VR to classrooms, using immersive nature videos to help children with varying needs regulate their emotions and feel safe and calm. It did not take long to uncover the immense potential for VR to promote mindfulness and offer a secure place for children to access their emotions. Wishplay wanted to make VR and the joys and mindfulness benefits it brings accessible to as many people as possible.

Our team conducted semi-structured interviews with parents and educators at a western Quebec elementary school to gather valuable qualitative data regarding VR-use with children in the classroom and at home. We collaborated with Wishplay and subject-matter experts and conducted a thorough research review in order to identify what information would be valuable for educators and parents looking to start using VR with their children for emotional regulation and mindfulness.

We gathered these insights and knowledge into a quick start guide and comprehensive playbook to be used when administering VR to children. The quick start guide was designed to get educators and parents with a range of technological abilities up and running with the Oculus as quickly and smoothly as possible. Using the full playbook, educators and parents are able to learn the fundamentals of VR, understand the benefits to mindfulness and learning, and gain the confidence to administer it to children.

Over the course of the project, our team learned many important lessons. Through our interviews and research, we learned about the therapeutic benefits of VR as well as safety and ethical concerns when it comes to using headsets with children. We learned about the importance of asking the right questions—those that would help us best understand the needs, joys, and frustrations of our target audience and design a guide that would address those needs and be of most use to them.

Using collaborative virtual tools like Miro, Google Drive, Zoom, and Slack, we learned to effectively carry out design work in an online environment. We learned that good communication is key to effective collaboration in a virtual co-design process.

From an operations perspective, we learned to be flexible and agile in our workflow. Creating a guide to working with established hardware meant we had to test and revise often to ensure our instructions and methods reflected the latest software and hardware changes at all times. It also prescribed that the final deliverable be a living document, one that would be easy to update in future iterations.

Above all, we learned about the importance of keeping accessibility and joy as the central tenants of this project. We are extremely grateful to the parents, educators, and subject-matter experts for their time and contributions to this project.

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Project Description:

Food delivery apps are an incredible convenience for consumers, but restaurants face fees of up to 30% of their gross revenue. Our product is aimed at providing the same feature rich experience customers expect at a much lower cost. Fully customizable, our app is built on the Angular framework, allowing it to expand to accommodate hundreds or even thousands of restaurants in the future with little to no modification.

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Project Description:

Our task is to design a 5 axis CNC machine for MAD building Technology. The concept is the same as 3-axis, but the spindle is now capable of rotating around x and y which add in another 2-axis.

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Project Description:

The micro:bit community website is built to be a website with scalable translation functionality. Our client, Andrew McDonald, a passionate educator decided to build the website to promote a creative mindset in students and teachers. This website needs to be restructured so that texts on the website can be dynamically translated.

Our team applied internationalization-framework to the project to meet the requirement. Users can now choose different languages in the dropdown menu and the website can detect whichever language the user choose and translate to the specific language. The mechanism designed by our team helps our client to add any languages without code changes is needed. Thus, it is easy to maintain the website.

Our team learned to configure and use the translation framework to the project to build a multilingually supported website. Also, we learned to connect the website to the Google Firebase to use Realtime Database to let users receive updates with the newest data instantly and automatically.

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Project Description:

In September of 2021, this team was fortunate enough to be paired with the Tetra Society of North America. Tetra is a not-for-profit organization that creates a space for volunteer engineers to design products and systems to aid those with disabilities. We were given the task of designing a wheelchair transportation system to allow individuals that are in powered and non-powered wheelchairs to have access to their personal belongings.
Our design consists of a 90-degree rail that is attached to the rear and right/left side of the users’ chair, depending on their preference. Attached to the rail is the backpack holder that can hold a bag that weighs up to thirty pounds. This entire system is controlled by a NEMA 23 servo motor, this motor drives a single wheel along the bottom of the rail to move the backpack holder to the side of the chair and back. The motor is controlled by two Arduinos one controlling the motor and the other attached to a joystick on one of the armrests. The second Arduino is attached to a joystick that controls the motor via a Bluetooth chip.
The market currently does not have a product such as this one, that can be fitted to any chair and that is at a reasonable price. This product is yet to be finished; this team was tasked to create the transportation system but not the mounting system. The team’s hope is that whoever continues this project will produce a mounting system that will allow it to be completely universal to make this wonderful product a reality.
Thank you to Algonquin College and Tetra Society of North America, for the constant support and guidance in the creation of such an amazing product. This group is proud to say that we have worked for such a fantastic company with such a great cause.

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Project Description:

The application contains five categories: Animals, fruits, numbers, colors, and body parts. Each category has flashcards, and two games: Memory cards and Find the object. Vibrant images of various animals, colors, fruits, etc are provided, with their names given in both English and Urdu. Users have the option to listen to both Urdu and English pronunciations of each object. Our app is giving the opportunity for kids to learn while playing and enjoying, which also fulfills our clients’ vision.

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Project Description:

Our project deliverable was to create a mobile application for WildRoga, a female-led business that centers around yoga and wellness for BIPOC and underrepresented communities. The app will allow members to watch live stream classes, pre-recorded yoga videos, as well as engage in community content where members can comment on posts administered by our client. In parallel with the mobile app, our team developed a web-based administrative dashboard to serve as a tool for managing the app’s content as well as to enhance the instructors’ live streaming experience.

Our client, Ro Nwosu, is looking to expand her business by attracting new users who intend on using mobile devices as a primary viewing platform. Additionally, her intention is to create a safe and inclusive space to promote health and wellness within our community and beyond.

Our team, Hyacinth, is Sara Thomas (Team Lead), Naomi Gallupe (Design Lead), Stive Avendaño Zambrano (Technical Lead), Kelsey Harrison (Full-Stack Developer), Pavlo Ternytskyi (Full-Stack Developer), and Sevda Hasanli (UX/UI Designer and Researcher). Together, we are a group of motivated individuals with a variety of different skills and talents. Throughout this project we learned a broad range of skills; from professionally collaborating with a client to acquiring the essential information and resources needed to complete our deliverables. From a technical standpoint, our developers learned how to implement live streaming technology using MUX as well as how to implement a third-party payment system using Stripe.

In the first month, we established a roadmap along with the appropriate design tool (Figma) and development tools (Expo, Next.js, Firebase, Stripe, Mux, and Ecamm) needed for the project. Our developers conducted technical research by building a collection of POCs to ensure that our client would use the best possible streaming and payment options available given our time and resources limitation. Our designers conducted user and product research to analyze the market and collect visual references to base our initial designs on. This research amounted to the creation of the low fidelity paper prototypes. In the later months, we gathered insightful feedback from our client and professors in order to make the necessary changes that led to our medium fidelity prototypes. Following more guidance from our client and professors, our designers crafted a high fidelity prototype which served as a visual aid for our developers during the development phase. During this phase, our developers worked tirelessly to ensure all deliverables were met. This involved heavy collaboration with every team member to ensure that we could test and deliver the best possible product we could build.

This project is the sum of four months of hard work, collaboration and commitment to building the best product we could given the amount of time that we had. In many ways, this project has helped lay the groundwork for the beginning of our professional careers as we approach graduation. As a team, we are grateful for the opportunity to work on a project of this caliber. We’d like to thank our professors, Algonquin College, and our client Ro, for an amazing and unforgettable opportunity.

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Project Description:

Connected is a company that guides international students through the complex journey of studying abroad and finding employment in their desired field. Services offered by Connected include finding the right program and institution for each student, assistance with the applications to each desired academic institution, visa processing assistance and career planning.

One of the core functions of Connected is creating personalized reports to succinctly detail programs that are a best-fit for the student. The process starts with an assessment of the student’s academic goals and educational background. Next, Connected employees procure a list of programs in cities that offer the best combination of institution-program notoriety, employment opportunity, and overall student experience. Additional factors considered in the program selection include: tuition costs, academic requirements, English language requirements and more.

Connected builds the student reports through lengthy, manually extracted information from institution’s program pages. Each of these reports can take up to six hours to construct. Thus, Connected sought to remediate the arduous process.

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Our team conducted a meeting with Connected’s founder, Syed Zeehad, to learn about Connected business operations and the company’s software needs. We learned Connected builds its student reports detailing best-fit programs with respect to employment opportunities through tedious, time-consuming processes. It became clear very quickly what Syed was in search of and how we could help. In fact, Syed had completed a lot of the application design beforehand and came to us with a very solidified idea. It was very evident the report processing time could be greatly decreased which could allow employees to allocate more time to generate sales and respond to clients faster. Further, it sets the stage for future company growth and expansion.

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Team HelloWorld took Syed’s designs and set out to build the tool Connected employees needed. As a team we had our own planning to do in order to create an application that best-fit for his team’s needs. Together, we chose to build an authenticating web application with an easy to use page flow that built a report beginning from student intake to generating a final report.

The application is comprised of Node.Js, Express.Js, HTML, CSS, and MySQL.

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Remaining details are protected IP safeguarded by NDA.

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Project Description:

As technology innovates and industries evolve, so should education. The Algonquin Electrical Engineering program has a lack of content dealing with MOSFETs and IGBTs. To solve this, lab material can be developed which outlines the function and application of such components

The DC Inverter projects Goal to design and create a custom-built DC inverter that will be capable of driving a 3-Phase Motor. Additionally, this process will need to be replicable and broken down into draft labs which can be turned into full-fledged assignments used for future students of the Electrical Engineering Technologies program at Algonquin.

The deliverables of this project or separated into 2 sections. The first being the Custom DC inverter which will need to be designed and created with accessible tools and components (Including the use off the programs standard Issue Arduinos). The second section will provide 2-3 draft labs which will breakdown the process into fundamentals which could be taught to future students.

Together with a finalized design/PCB and a comprehensive lab breakdown, we hope to satisfy our clients request and inspire new material to be added into the curriculum.

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Project Description:

In the past 2 years, the global economy was pushed down because of the heavy restrictions imposed to contain the spread of COVID-19. Small business owners suffered even more due to their operational limitations and reach. Even as restrictions are lifted local stores will need further support to recover from the potential financial losses incurred in the latest years.

POPTikR is a technological solution that seeks to close the distance between customers and small stores that may not have a big budget for marketing and PR. The app displays deals, coupons, and promotions which serve as incentives for consumers to try local businesses instead of big chains. This solution will help family-owned establishments and local stores to attract traffic and recover more quickly.

Our team put together this solution in accordance with the client’s preferences and input along with the duration of the project. Best practices in design and communication were followed to provide a complete and functional final product.

Technologies with high industry penetration such as React Native, Amazon Web Services, and GraphQL were selected and added to the tech stack to ensure continuity in the project’s future and flexibility.

Most recently, the POP TiKR mobile application had its home page updated with a better layout, and other team members proceeded to test the usability, the validity of information, links, and design across multiple devices.

We would like to thank our client, Kamal, Algonquin College, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Applied Research Innovation and Entrepreneurship center for their support and for this wonderful opportunity to be part of the team.

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