Algonquin Team Develops Dating App for Celebrated Sex Therapist Sue McGarvie
Posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2021
“Ottawa is sexy, but much more private” explains Sue McGarvie, a well-known clinical sex and relationship therapist based in Ottawa known for her popular radio talk show, Sunday Night Sex with Sue.
There are people here who want to have fun, she explains, but they work for the Prime Minister, or a government agency, or are in the military, so they’re “much more discreet,” she says.
This is what led McGarvie to create the Ducklings Dating App, which is an extension of her 5000 plus strong ‘Ducklings’ community.
Ducklings are a members-only group in Ottawa who gather for events as diverse as a holiday fundraiser at the legion hall to a tour of a BDSM dungeon (it’s a trip to the dungeon that’s responsible for the name ‘ducklings,’ as someone observing the outing noted that McGarvie’s group followed her like ducklings.)
About half of the Ducklings are single, and half of them are couples, and they’re of different sexual orientations, and all of them are looking for different things: some for friendship, some for love, some for friends with benefits, some simply for a fun night out.
McGarvie has had 150 love matches out of this group, and attended six ‘Duckling’ weddings before the pandemic hit, but she realized that the group was not enough. She decided she wanted to create a dating app that would expand on what the group has to offer.
She said half the dating apps she saw on the market weren’t open to a variety of different ways of dating or a variety of sexual orientations, and she saw “a need to blend them”—an app where you could browse profiles like on Tinder but have many different types of people looking for a variety of different experiences.
Another unique feature of the Ducklings group and, by extension, the app, is that its male members are vetted by McGarvie’s team before they are allowed to join.
“We screen for kindness,” McGarvie explains.
“I’m not trying to discriminate against men,” she adds, “but if I’ve going to have a problem, it’s going to be with them.”
With the idea for this one-of-a-kind dating app in mind, McGarvie approached Algonquin College, which connected her with a group of students in the Computer Engineering Technology program, who started developing the dating app for her as part of the course requirements in the final two semesters of their program. She heard about the program—run through the Office of Applied Research, Innovation & Entrepreneurship—where Algonquin students work on applied research projects for external clients in exchange for course credits, through one her Duckling group members, who happens to be a professor at the College.
The team of students—Khair Ahmed, Khisro Hashimi, Josef Kundinger-Markhauser, Ethan Thompson, Michael Turner and Lin Wan Zhou—were able to deliver McGarvie a fully functional app, which they will present at this Friday’s Virtual RE/ACTION Showcase.
Team lead Josef Kundinger-Markhauser said working with McGarvie was “awesome” and that they were really happy there were actually able to deliver a final product by the end of the two semesters, despite the scale of the work.
Kundinger-Markhauser said one of the biggest challenges of the project was simply learning how to build a mobile app, “which none of us had done.” The team also had to learn how to use a program that would allow them to cross-code so the app would work both on Android and iOS.
McGarvie is thrilled with the work the students have done. “They have been absolutely fantastic,” she exclaims, “to the point where I want to hire one or two of them.”
“I give them all A pluses!”
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