Teenagers dream up innovations for city’s future
In the future, Edmonton will have a monorail snaking along the water in the river valley. A fountain shaped like a wild rose will stand in the centre of Sir Winston Churchill Square. And classrooms will have skylights so students won’t feel like their school is a bunker. Maybe. High school students were given the opportunity Saturday to share their innovative ideas on how to change their schools and their city for the better at In-Fair, a showcase presented by UAlberta Innovation Lab in partnership with Startup Edmonton, the University of Alberta, and the city’s two school boards.
Tartang Patel and Artur Udovichenko, both 17, were inspired to think of classrooms with skylights for their own school, Harry Ainlay High School, which they say has no windows and just one skylight in the library.
“All the kids in that school are in darkness and (by dismissal time) it’s already evening so they don’t get a lot of sunlight during the day, especially in winter,” says Patel. “It feels like a bomb shelter, to be honest.”
The school would be so much better if students could look up in their classrooms and see sunshine and blue sky, say the friends, who both want to be engineers. The idea would lower the cost of providing artificial lighting and expose students to more Vitamin D. But it’s more about the psychological effect, says Patel.
Images of what their Crystal Blue Class would look like were attached to a display board at St. Joseph’s High school, where 14 other individuals and teams also presented their ideas for a panel of judges that included school board trustees and several city councillors.
Jenny Li and Alison Barnett decided to focus on enhancing the arts by renovating Churchill Square. The 17-year-old-old Grade 12 Harry Ainlay students say adding a lighted fountain with a base shaped like a wild rose (the provincial flower) that plays music yearround would enhance enjoyment of the space.
Christopher Pulunto, 16, thinks a monorail that would run at treetop level from the northeast part of the city to the southeast, through the river valley, would provide the people riding it with “a great view and an enjoyable experience.”
The judging panel awarded Akrama Mirza, a 16-year-old Lillian Osborne High School student, the “most innovative concept to improve Edmonton” award for his Smart Doors. The idea involves placing magnets inside the perimeters of doors and coils of copper wire into the frames that generate electricity every time the door is opened.
Angelo Encarnacion, a 17-year-old at Jasper Place High School, took the “most innovative concept to improve high schools” award for his Talking Trash program aimed at creating a culture where students are proactive about waste management.
And 18-year-old Alex Villaneuve and 17-year-old Cody Anderson, also from Jasper Place High, received the “favourite innovation concept” award. Their idea was to compose a living wall mural using potted plants.