screen shot of student-created app "orca swipe" with text "find pods: explore new pods that match your interests, swipe right on the discover page to join pods that align with your passions and captivate your curiosity " and image of people gathering on a beach at sunset, labelled "English Bay"

Impactful Intelligence: Computing students use AI to power web applications

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230 students.

60 teams.

12 sets, 2 intakes, 2 campuses.

12 faculty members.

5 weeks, 23 working days.

Multiple geolocations.

A gazillion slack and discord messages.

Countless merge conflicts.

Full stack of technologies.

Endless chatlogs.

1 common goal.

The school year for first year Computer Systems Technology (CST) Diploma students winds up with an intense 5-week team project. This year’s theme took on the headline-grabbing technology of the day: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The faculty team, led by Carly Orr and Chris Thompson, addressed their students: “After watching the final presentations, three words come to mind:

  • Compassion – During the design thinking progress you dug deep into your hearts to empathize with the world. In each team, you showed great compassion towards one another, as stress mounted and deadlines were coming at you – left, centre, and right.
  • Creativity – You came up with innovative solutions to problems and niches that may not have even existed in the world a year ago! Or even 3 months ago.
  • Competence – You have proved yourselves worthy of BCIT CST reputation of being ‘crunchable’ and hands-on. Go forth now. Continue be agile, reflective, and resilient developers, capable of solving problems in a complex world.”

Each team’s final presentation included playback of a three-minute youtube and two minutes of live Q&A. Students, faculty, and guests were invited to vote for favourites. Some of the standout projects:

Most Innovative

Most Useful

Grand-Prize Winner: Tie!!

  • Pantrymaster – Recipe recommendation app
  • TLDR – Designed to reduce air travel stress due to delays

Best UI/UX Design

  • Grand-Prize Winner: OrcaSwipe – Discover, host and connect gatherings (app screenshot pictured above)
  • Runner-up: BBY-09 Coursla – Find and compare online courses

Best Teamwork

Student experience

“Working with AI was the most challenging and also most satisfying part of this project,” according to team QuickQueue, comprised of Aaron Lo, Alex Deschenes, Marco Ho, and Derek Tran. QuickQueue is an app designed to help users on any gaming platform efficiently find their best matched video-games by using filters and AI to provide personalized game recommendations.

“After all the work, the testing, and building in fail-safes, it was very satisfying to see our program give very personalized recommendations to the user in a consistent way,” explained Aaron.

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