TAIV – Application Enhancements

Posted: September 4, 2019

Project Term: Summer 2019

TAIV enables business owners to create, schedule and play their own TV advertisements instead of the commercials that appear during the broadcast. This helps establishments create a targeted audience and drive sales. During the summer term at the ACE Project Space, a team of students completed a number of enhancements to improve the user experience.

Learning about estimation and automated testing

The Business Information Technology and Business Technology Management students on the project learned new tools to help them become better IT professionals. They learned how to estimate workloads by playing planning poker, a fun consensus-based game that helps software teams provide better estimates. To save time on testing and bug fixing, the students learned how to use Cypress and apply it to the project. Cypress helped the team to ensure the old codebase worked with the new code the students introduced.

Deliverables

The team dedicated to TAIV completed the following deliverables during the summer term at the ACE Project Space:

• Home page redesign
• Content scheduling and selection
• My Content page
• Bug fixes

What our students are saying

“It was a wonderful learning experience while working with this project. We did Sprint planning meeting for every sprint and estimated the amount of work to do in a sprint but later I experienced that sometimes things are not in your hand. So, we faced unexpected delays to accomplish some sprints. At first, we were frustrated but with the time we learned to be patient and always be open minded for uncertainties.” – Ravneet Singh

“It was a very good learning opportunity at project space. I really enjoyed this project and the professional environment that project space provides. I actually worked with real world client, learned how to operate and keep everything on the right track. I learned how to estimate the workload by doing the planning poker, know how to estimate the efficient hours of the team to get the capacity. Although we faced some problems in the beginning of the project, instructors in project space helped us to overcome and gave many helpful advice.” – Man Tran

“The overall experience at the project was great. Having to be given an existing code base and a code review from the client was very helpful. With the code base I learned how to format blocks of code like how the client would code it. Code review with the client is really helpful. Jordan graduated from the U of M course. So when he would criticize the code he would suggest another way to do that is more efficient and would help the site perform better. Not only just how functions should be coded, I also learned other methods to code in React.” – Billy Saengsouvanna

“It was a great time and experience for me to work at ACE Space. The instructors are very friendly and helpful, they motivated and gave me a lot of helpful advice that helped me to stay on track. At ACE Space, I learned React, the most modern and popular JavaScript library, GIT which helps me to manage the project. In addition, I also improved my teamwork and presentation skills that will help me for my future career.” – Quan Nguyen Vu Hoang

“Coming here to project space was a great learning opportunity for me. Having a real client to work for was a great learning experience. He was really helpful throughout the term with the code review and feedback, we also worked on an existing codebase which was a great practice to get us ready for the industry. Having instructors around was also helpful in pointing us in the right direction when I was having some problems with local repository. I had to learn new programs and languages for the project space such as React, Redux, Firebase and many more which I’m sure would be useful for me in the future.” – Francis Cruz

TAIV web site: https://taiv.tv/

Technologies used

• Zeplin
• Trello
• React & Redux
• Google Firebase
• Cypress
• GitHub
• Bizzagi Modeler
• Balsamiq

Red River College – Change Advisory Board Application

Posted: September 4, 2019

Project Term: Summer 2019

The ACE Project Space required a robust and scalable application to better manage change and incident requests, assets and those using them. The system that was in use was clunky and did not provide the full range of functionality that the Change Advisory Board (CAB) was looking for. A student team at the ACE Project Space went about designing the application from scratch. The purpose was to deliver a working application with asset, user and change management functionality by the end of the four-month term. Completing the application was accomplished through extensive research and learning through Lynda, Code Academy and Udemy as well as collaboration with the RPI research group.

Building a robust application for Red River College

Originally, the College wanted to buy change management software. However, after realizing the cost of third-party solutions and a lack of scalability and customization, the CAB decided to contract students to build their system. The team of Business Information Technology and Business Technology Management students worked with faculty and staff within Applied Computer Education to deliver a solution that may one day be integrated across the College.

Deliverables

The main deliverables for this phase of the project were asset and change management.

What our students are saying

“It was great to learn so many new skills and concepts over the course of the work term. Many of the technologies used in our project are widely used in the local industry and it was beneficial to learn things that have practical use.

I feel confident that I could work on large-scale systems after participating in the Agile process and working with a team on a multi-phase application.” – Andrew Reid

“I gained a great deal of experience from the project term. Experiencing the practical side of the things that we learned in the previous terms was very beneficial. It was very constructive to practice Scrum in the project like the scrum meetings, daily scrum, etc. Leading some of the client meetings gave some hands-on experience about working with clients in a professional setting.” – Aziz Dhillon

“Before starting the BIT program, I had no previous IT experience. The rapid pace of the first few terms often left me feeling frustrated and wondering if I could become a developer. While in the project space I had the chance to work on a project using Meteor/React. Having the time to learn a single technology and apply that learning to a project was a real boost to my confidence. I was able to use the knowledge I had gained to solve a real-world problem and develop software from scratch using a technology I had never used before.” – Chris Podolsky

“I learned about Agile methodologies during term 2, but this was the first time that I have experienced how Agile works. In addition, I also learned how important design patterns are and depending on how the application is built could lead to the failure of the project. From developing the application with many components, I gained a strong understanding of the relationship between a parent component and children components. I believe that this experience will be very helpful for my career after graduation. Lastly, I will miss working with my team!” – Jihyeon Lee

“Working in a group to achieve a common goal while pooling all our unique abilities and personalities was an invaluable experience. My only regret was that it was only four months. I hold this term to be one of the most beneficial of my academic career not only for the technical skills that I have gained but also the confidence and personal growth I have made. To anyone unsure about project space, you will not regret it!” – Palmer Rouse

Technologies used

• Meteor
• React
• MongoDB
• Robo3T
• Cypress

Red River Bookstore – Web Site and Inventory Management System

Posted: September 4, 2019

Project Term: Summer 2019

Red River Bookstore has been operating for decades and has amassed a huge inventory of used books, comics, music, movies, video games and other miscellaneous items. With such a large inventory and very little online presence, the bookstore staff could not meet the growing demands without integrating digital solutions. ACE Project Space students worked with the bookstore to gather their requirements, and then build viable solutions to help the business manage its inventory.

Continuous learning to build solutions

In completing the project, our students learned about how to work and learn together to achieve client success. They learned how to build their solution in React as well as how to integrate third party services to meet stakeholders’ requirements. The students built a web application that allows the bookstore staff to administer an inventory database and manage aspects unique to a bookstore, such as establishing and assigning genres. The students added a blog to assist with customer marketing and included a search feature to help customers find products that have been added to inventory.

Deliverables

The dedicated team of Business Information Technology and Business Technology Management students completed the following deliverables for the Red River Bookstore:

• A website
• Administrator screens
• Admin authorization
• SVC file upload functionality
• Add and edit inventories functionalities
• Products manage by generated UID numbers
• Add and edit genre lists functionality
• Web hosting setups

Red River Bookstore web site: https://www.redriverbookstore.com/

Technologies used

• ReactJs
• Meteor
• AWS
• Waves
• MongoDB Atlas

Manitoba Genealogical Society – Manitoba Name Index

Posted: September 3, 2019

Project Term: Summer 2019

The Manitoba Genealogical Society (MGS) organizes and archives information about the lives of Manitobans and their family relationships. In a previous term at the ACE Project Space, students helped to build the consolidated Manitoba Name Index (MANI) service to provide a central source for searching genealogical data. During the summer term, a new team of students worked on improvements to the MANI codebase and delivered a number of enhancements to improve the user experience and create new revenue generation opportunities.

Improving an existing product

During the four-month summer term, our students took the reins from a previous product iteration of the MANI archive. Students learned how to review existing code from another team, understand the associated functionality and underlying code, and then build enhancements to add value to the product.

Deliverables

ACE Project Space students worked together to complete the following deliverables:

• Page footer
• Google Analytics integration
• Member registration
• Improvements to search
• Cemetery transcription purchasing
• An eStore to sell print and PDF books available in the MGS library
• Volunteer registration
• Donation page

What our students are saying

“The project was quite a formidable learning experience in terms of project management, automated testing and setting up the servers. Following Sprints and Kanban board in a running project was a whole new experience.” – Upkardeep Singh

“Based on my classroom learning, while I working at the ACE project space, I learned how to implement that knowledge in real production environment. Our project was done with PHP and JS along with Microsoft Sql server. My best experience was how a team builds something in real life and how they integrate their works together.” – Shaik Abdullah

“It was a very nice experience, got to learn new technologies like Microsoft IIS, GIT and most importantly being able to work with the live server has been a privilege. Meeting with the client has been a huge help in understanding how the code base works. Overall, I can say that ACE project has been a great learning experience for me and I got to learn a lot about the real life work environment.” – Aryan Sharma

“The whole ACE project experience was very interesting. The knowledge from previous courses really helped me in the project, including the use of PHP, which I was excited to do. I think that the project helped me settle into a workplace environment more easily and it was a pleasure to work for.” – Connor Speidel

“I gained knowledge of being a Client Representative/Business Analyst by gathering requirements from the client, managing tasks, testing developed functions before presenting and especially project management work. Being the client’s main contact, booking, arranging and leading meetings were a very valuable experience.” – Duy Anh Tran

The Manitoba Genealogical Society web site: http://mbgenealogy.com/

Technologies used

• HTML
• CSS
• PHP
• GitHub
• GitKraken
• SQL Server Management Studio
• IIS
• Cypress

Equal Opportunities West – Resource Management System

Posted: September 3, 2019

Project Term: Summer 2019

Equal Opportunities West is a Winnipeg-based non-profit organization that provides support services to adults with developmental disabilities, helping them to attain meaningful employment. The organization’s rapid growth in the past five years increased the burden of administering activities involving staff, students, and vehicle assets. Employees were using a paper-based system and board to set activities, track assets and communicate with staff. The system could not keep up with all the activities and associated changes happening simultaneously.  A team of students from the ACE Project Space built a comprehensive resource management system to digitize the organization’s current system and improve business processes.

Building a system to effectively schedule resources

The student project team created a resource management system enabling Equal administrators to assign and schedule personnel and assets to activities, built a message board to simplify and track communication throughout the organization, and incorporated tracking of absences, vehicle usage, participants and others. The students learned how to overcome both technical and non-technical challenges, client management skills, as well as how to gather and implement the right requirements.

Deliverables

The students built the following sub-systems for this project:

• Absence Management System
• Asset Tracking System
• Activity Management System
• Incident Management System
• Human Resource Management System
• Student Management System
• Message Board

What our students are saying

“I have learned of how to work with people we have never met before, as well as, working with clients and late requirements and working with strict deadlines.” – David Beauchamp

“Quickly knowing what we were all good at and using it to develop our application helped us tremendously. For me it was communicating and learning to work with a team as I am usually working alone. A special thank you to Quy for his front-end skills, David for his overall knowledge of the software, Kanisha for always being attentive and precise with her work and Mateus for organizing the team and keeping this under control. I could not ask for a better team.” – Jules Douglas

“Working within a diverse team and with members who have different ideas gave me an opportunity to learn new ways to solve problems and provided a good team experience.” – Kanisha Patel

“I have learned of how to communicate with my teammates and how to trust them to perform the actions they were responsible to. I also learned how to conduct meetings and how important testing is for the development of an application.” – Mateus Herculano

“I learned to apply agile methodology in the project, which allows us to have deliverables in place to show customers and get constant feedback from customers. I also learned to deal with customers to gather requirements, verify and document requirements, and made sure the application met those requirements.” – Quy Tran

Equal Opportunities West web site: http://www.equalopportunitieswest.com/en/home

Technologies used

• React
• MongoDB
• AWS
• GitHub
• GitKraken
• Meteor
• ScaleGrid

Manitoba Angel Dresses Inventory Website

Posted: September 3, 2019

Project Term: Summer 2019

Manitoba Angel Dresses is a volunteer-driven organization whose vision and mission is to ease the stress of families grieving from the loss of their stillborn child. Volunteers create personalized dresses and other clothing items from donated bridal and bridesmaid gowns that are later used for dressing the babies to provide an opportunity for families to share a grieving experience and take photographs to provide a lasting memory. The organization was working with an outdated system for tracking their donation and new creation inventories. ACE Project Space students created a simple web application to improve the user experience of managing the organization’s inventory.

Improvements to manage donations and dress creations

Our students achieved the goal of improving inventory management for Manitoba Angel Dresses by implementing a handful of forms to control the input of each different stage of the organization’s donation process. The index page is a well-catalogued donation list and has many different search functions for sorting the large amount of data held. The students created an easy-to-use drag and drop system for two pages centered around creating and managing groups of inventory, including items such as material donations and new creations.

Deliverables

The students completed the following deliverables for this project:

• An index page showing all of current donations
• A donation entry page with a form to enter details associated with the dress donation
• A stock sheet page that generates a unique inventory entry for each donation
• A layette and kit page for building unique kits and layettes
• A basic reporting system on data contained in the inventory system

What our students are saying

“This term has been an essential experience for my future career as a web developer. Working in a team setting is vastly different than working solo, the feedback you receive from your team-mates enhanced my knowledge as a developer.

Our biggest takeaway from the project space is the fact that my group and I created an entire web application from start to finish. This isn’t something a lot of people can say they did, and I’m super proud of the work that my team and I have accomplished. We’ve learned multiple new languages this term that will help us find future work more easily, as well as learn more languages more easily. We’ve made our clients very happy with our work, and will continue to work with them with anything they may need help within the future.” – Dustin Martens

“Work at ACE Project space is a huge valuable experience. There are some opportunities to work with real clients and amazing projects related to IT career industry which is fantastic. As working in a team with other students from BIT and BTM and was guided by well-knowledge instructors, that helped me to understand, learn and master a lot of programming and project management skills. One of my biggest achievements is our web app have been worked as client’s order with well-designed outlook and functionality features to manage their system. It’s actually amazing adventure for this term, and that would be very worthy in my career.” – Phong Ngo

Manitoba Angel Dresses web site: https://manitobaangeldresses.com/

Technologies used

• React
• Meteor
• MongoDB
• Visual Studio Code
• Node Package Manager
• Atmosphere
• GIT repositories
• Robo 3t

ACE Project Space Tour

Posted: August 27, 2019

Find out how education and innovation collide

Members of the information security community are invited for a tour of Red River College’s ACE Project Space on Tuesday, September 17 from 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM.

What can you do on the tour?

• Meet our students, faculty, and staff
• Learn about our Entrepreneur-in-Residence opportunities
• See how our facility can accommodate your projects, workshops, and events
• Investigate opportunities to become an ACE Project Space partner

Register on Eventbrite

ACE Students Share their Geneva Experience

Posted: August 26, 2019

In the first week of August, our Applied Computer Education (ACE) students completed an overseas trip with support generously provided by ICTAM, Lotlinx and the ACE department at Red River College. Along with ACE faculty, the students travelled for seven days in and near Geneva, Switzerland and returned having experienced an international taste of what the global city has to offer. The trip provided our students with the new perspectives, cultural awareness, social experiences, self-reliance, and confidence needed to pursue their dreams.

Pictures from the Trip

Live vicariously through our students as you peruse some of the pictures from the trip!

Geneva City Tour

CERN

Inside a Glacier

UN and Red Cross Tour

ACE Announces 2019 Student Awards

Posted: June 13, 2019

The Department of Applied Computer Education would like to congratulate all of our 2019 student award recipients for their achievements over the past year.

Students were selected across all of our IBIT, BIT, BTM, and InfoSec programs. The Applied Computer Education Awards presentation brochure contains the complete list of awards and recipients.

Download the Awards Presentation Brochure

ACE Department Brings Technology Camps to Brazil

Posted: June 7, 2019

Each spring, RRC’s Applied Computer Education Department runs Technology Camps for high-school students of all genders and to middle-school girls out of the Exchange District Campus. The camps allow young people to explore different technologies through diverse hands-on activities.

Building connections and bringing learning opportunities

In spring 2019, Red River College staff members, Stephen Jay, Cristy Kubara and Marnie-Leigh Boulet, brought the highly successful Technology Camps to three different schools in Brazil.

This unique opportunity came about after the Chair of ACE, Haider Al-Saidi, went with a delegation to Brazil in the fall of 2018. While there, he made connections with several schools that were interested in bringing the RRC Technology Camps to their students. After some follow-up communication, the camps were scheduled at the Pan American Christian Academy, Metodista Bertioga school and the Metodista school in Sao Paulo.

Similar to the Technology Camps in Winnipeg, the objective of the camps in Brazil was to show students what the Information Technology industry is all about and to potentially get them interested in a career in I.T. The camps also provided students with new material and experiences they may not have otherwise encountered.

The students who attended were a mix of male and female high school students (grade 10-12) and each camp had approximately 25 attendees. The day involved four different sessions that were one hour each, topics included, web development, database development, networking and web security. Stephen Jay taught each camp, while Cristy Kubara and Marnie-Leigh Boulet acted as E.A.’s.

A positive experience for the students

Not only were the camps a positive experience for the students, but the instructors also came away with success stories that made it all worth it for everyone involved. “One of the schools we went to didn’t have a data projector, which meant we had to improvise. I was writing security injections on a whiteboard. Even though the technology was sub-par, the students were helping each other, they were learning and getting it,” recalls Jay. “At another school, there were a group of kids in the back row that were ‘too cool’ to engage. As the day went on, we were able to get their attention through technology.”

“Going to Brazil and meeting all the people was such a wonderful experience,” adds Kubara. “They are so warm and welcoming. The students were so excited and willing to learn. The first thing they would talk about was wondering about how cold it is in Canada, and ‘is it really cold?’ We showed them pictures of the snow and told them how we embrace the winters rather than hide away from it. Most of them said they weren’t afraid of the cold, because it would be a better life for them in Canada.”

At the moment there are no set dates for another round of Technology Camps in Brazil, but the schools and RRC instructors are both hoping to organize something as soon as next spring.

View photos of the Brazil Technology Camps