Students get innovative
Innovation and Technology Showcase a new venue for Fleming College students to display their work
Fleming College students in four different programs showed off their semester-long work in the college’s first Innovation and Technology Showcase on Thursday.
Aaron Junkin, third-year computer engineering student, stood beside an automatic vacuum cleaner his group had created an original design for.
“Because we’ve started from scratch and it was a trial-anderror process I would think we’ve put (200) hours into it easily,” said Junkin about how much time had gone into the project this school semester.
Jackson Hamilton and his group partner Aaden Storms-Bedard, both computer engineering students, designed a “magic mirror” for the showcase. The design was to have a computer monitor on one side of a two-way mirror that could display a modifiable screen on a reflective surface.
“We also have built in Amazon’s Alexa voice services if you wanted to ask it a couple questions,” Bedard said.
It wasn’t just tech on display at the showcase.
Kyle Varty, third-year marketing student, stood in front of a squash equipment display. Smith’s group created a business plan to improve service for the Peterborough Squash Club and help the nonprofit club make more money.
“We’ve been working non-stop for 13 weeks,” Varty said. “We turned a room in our house into a kind of war room. We’d have sheets of paper all over the walls so we could get some ideas down.”
His project group – called Courting the Community – learned that 94 per cent of the club’s business came from membership and were trying to diversify its earnings through events and partnerships.
In addition to the project displays, a panel discussion took place at 2 p.m. featuring Neil Morton of PTBOCanada.com and Rob Howard of Kawartha Local. The discussion was moderated by Javier Bravo of FastStart Fleming.
The showcase was sponsored by Bell Canada and featured 33 different projects from students as part of four college programs: marketing, international trade, wireless information networking and computer engineering technology.
All 33 groups were demonstrating their projects to judges floating around displays set up in the college’s Kawartha Trades and Technology Centre.
There were first and second place awards given to students in each program for innovation and presentation. There were also student and people choice awards. The Fleming extracurricular program, FastStart, also gave an award to the group with the best business potential in the region.