RE/ACTION Showcase

AC students research call centre wait times for foreign workers

A research study on improving the call answer rate of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Client Support Centre (CSC) will be presented by Interdisciplinary Studies in Human-Centred Design program students at next week’s RE/ACTION Showcase. With a current answer rate of seven per cent at IRCC call centers, the study focuses on improving service to clients and stakeholders.

Held virtually on Friday, Aug. 12, the RE/ACTION Showcase highlights leading-edge applied research, done in collaboration with industry, institutional and community partners, providing a glimpse into the future of technology and the current state of innovation. The goal of RE/ACTION is to create a platform for those students to showcase their hard work to an audience of peers, faculty and community partners.

“As a team we chose to focus on the experience of temporary foreign workers (TFW) when contacting the IRCC call centre, but the interesting point is that everybody, be it either TFW applicants, student permit applicants or permanent residence applicants, has shared the same experience,” said team leader Melis Burkay.

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Smart Tenant wins top prize at RE/ACTION Showcase

The winner of Friday’s virtual RE/ACTION: Applied Research Showcase is Smart Tenant, a mobile app for a property management company in Ottawa to engage in better and continuous communication with their tenants.

Hosted by the Office of Applied Research, Innovation & Entrepreneurship, the goal of RE/ACTION is to create a platform for students to showcase their hard work to an audience of their peers, faculty and community partners. Five project finalists were chosen out of 43 submissions to present to a panel of industry professionals during the live Zoom event.

Created by Mobile Application Design and Development students Karim Shaloh, Eric Shantz, J-C Castagne, Mohsen Qaddoura, Evan Liko and Sandeep Saini, Smart Tenant is a social platform for tenants in their client’s properties to communicate with one another. Team lead Shaloh detailed the team’s work over the past four months in creating an app that would help increase tenant retention, satisfaction and overall customer experience.

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Walking with wild elephants and swimming among dolphins: this AC project knows no bounds

Imagine a world where walking with elephants helped children manage their anxiety.

Using the power of virtual reality (VR), a team of three Algonquin College students are bringing dolphins to doorsteps, pyramids to backyards and elephants to classrooms to support children in need of a calming, secure and emotionally-safe environment.

Through the project New Realities: A Guide for Virtual Reality in Classrooms and at Home, learners from the Human-Centred Design Lab – Sara Hubberstey, Jean Pierre Lachance and Maria Tchernikova – are helping their client, Wishplay, bring VR to children at home and in the classroom.

Along with supervising professor Jed Looker, the team is developing a VR user guide that explores how to set-up and administer VR for children aged 6-12. The students determined user guide best practices through literature reviews, speaking with subject-matter experts, as well as interviews with educators and guardians.

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