Last month, 11 teams gathered online to compete in the 2020 Applied Computing Capstone Competition. Organized by Kevin Forest, and moderated by Program Coordinators Simon Hood and Magdin Stoica, and Associate Deans Pat Burns and Mark Orlando, the event allowed participants in two streams to compete for awards and prizes. The EDGE-Ready Award and the Sheridan Student Experience award, respectively sponsored by EDGE, Sheridan’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation hub, and Sheridan Student Services, represented awards for Capstone projects demonstrating the culmination of hard work, collaboration and achievement.
Six teams competed for the EDGE-Ready Award for the project demonstrating the greatest amount of impact and entrepreneurship, and five teams battled for the Sheridan Student Experience Award for the Capstone demonstrating a remarkable amount of collaboration, innovation and contribution to the community.
All participating teams took time out of their study and work schedules to present an impressive and inspiring abstract of their project. The breadth of applications ranged from games (a tower defence video game and a fantasy sports platform) to solutions for businesses struggling with COVID-19 challenges (a restaurateur app and a line management solution). Other projects revolved around health initiatives, way-finding, improved parking, maintaining kitchen inventory meal recommendations, tools to assist in making informed decisions, and an app to determine moisture levels in soil.
The results were nothing shy of inspirational!
Judges Joan Sweeney-Marsh, Jock Phippen, and Matt Rempel for the Sheridan Student Experience Award, and Besma Soltan and John Lam for the EDGE-Ready Award, evaluated project presentations and made the very difficult decision to deem the winner for each of the awards; in fact, the decision was so difficult for the Sheridan Student Experience Award that Student Services generously donated a second prize to allow for a first-place tie.
Congratulations to Team Ecoders for receiving the EDGE-Ready Award for their Soil Moisture Sensor project. Group members Ehsan Kabir (Application Developer), Nikhil Kapadia (Team Lead), Vedika Maheshwari (Hardware Developer) and Manpreet Sandhu (Application Developer) developed a device that measured moisture levels in soil and provided the user with reminders to water their plant. The students in Team Ecoders were all from the Computer Systems Technology – Software Development and Network Engineering program.
Using an ESP8266 board with an 18650 battery, Arduino IDE to code the ESP board, Android Studio, GoLand IDE, Kubernetes, Docker, and Node for the Web API, Team eCoder offered a bug-free and user-friendly interface through which to determine specific water needs of particular plants. Find out more about Soil Moisture Sensor.
The Sheridan Student Experience Award was shared by two teams: Tech Cat Dream (AI Yoga Learning Assistant) and Trailblazers (Digital Trails).
AI Yoga Learning Assistant, a web platform providing virtual yoga instruction using advanced ML pose detection technology was designed for anyone who has a laptop and webcam. Yoga poses are estimated with feedback provided in real-time. A webcam video stream is displayed side-by-side with a lesson video. The platform analyzes webcam frames and detects 17 body joints in 2D space and compares to the reference pose in time lesson video. Real-time feedback enables an improvement in yoga postures allowing for improvement in yoga practice. The students in team Tech Cat Dream are all from the Computer Systems Technology – Software Development and Network Engineering program.
Team members Steven Carino (Project Manager), Ngoc Phuong Thao Doan (Full-Stack Developer), Shannon Lim (Database Admin) and Seunghyun Ban (Front-end developer) worked together to produce a technology that included Posenet (a pre-trained model that detects the position of key body joints on a 2D graph), React.js (the front-end interface), Node.js and Express.js for backend API to process uploaded videos by pre-detect poses and store them, -MongoDB for the NoSQL database to store video details. The students worked with a variety of industry and academic partners. Find out more about AI Yoga Learning Assistant .
Digital Trails serves as a great resource for education, transportation and well-being using the Oakville Heritage Trails. Keeping accessibility and engagement top-of-mind, the digital trails mobile app helps residents plan walking trips to meet their personal needs, educates them on the history of the trails and the Town, and provides residents an engaging and fun experience while including live navigation, shared user experiences, interactive stories and augmented reality. The students in team Trailblazers are all from the Honours Bachelor of Computer Science (Mobile Computing).
Trailblazers Cory Da Silva (Lead Software Architect/Lead Risk Analyst), Kenneth Uyabeme (Project Owner/ User Experience Design Lead), Mike Banks (Scrum Master, Lead Requirement Analyst) developed the Digital Trails applications using Esri’s suite of Geo-information system technologies to present trail data and uses Apple’s ARKit to deliver an engaging experience. The app also uses IBM’s Watson Assistant to develop the app’s virtual assistant. Other technologies include ASP.NET Core, IBM Cloud Foundry. Learn about Digital Trails .
We congratulate the 2020 Capstone winners and commend all Capstone groups for their tireless and notable efforts on their cumulative projects. Their accomplishments were nothing short of spectacular.
The students in this cohort have overcome a number of challenges on their journey. The planning phase for these projects occurred during the Winter 2020 semester which featured an abrupt transition from on-campus to online learning brought about by the global pandemic. The development of these projects occurred completely remotely – students had to learn a variety of new skills and tools to compensate for the loss of in-person interaction. Despite all of these challenges there was no appreciable difference in the quality of the capstone projects delivered across the cohort, which is a testament to the adaptability, knowledge, perseverance and development skills of these students.
Students are the centre of Sheridan College. Awestruck, proud and amazed are three words that spring to mind when describing the level of skill, knowledge and proficiency our students have achieved in these 2020 Capstones.
