ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

On April 2, ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University students, staff and faculty joined Ottawa Deputy Mayor (Ward 18), city councillors (Ward 14) and (Ward 8), and other city employees at Algonquin College’s Nawapon Indigenous Learning Commons for the annual CityStudio Ottawa (CSO) HUBBUB event to showcase select student projects from the CSO initiative this year.

CSO is a collaboration between the City of Ottawa, the University of Ottawa, ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, Algonquin College and La Cité Collège. The program brings students and faculty from the different post-secondary institutions together with employees from the city to explore municipal challenges from different perspectives. The challenges they tackle are directly aligned with the and its Term of Council priorities as outlined in the . Students complete these projects as part of a credited course with the guidance of their instructor and the city representative.

The projects featured at the HUBBUB showcase – 17 in total, with four by ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ students – were selected by a committee of faculty from each academic institution as well as city staff, and were evaluated on the basis of innovation, impact, scalability and problem-solving. At the event, student representatives pitched their project idea to attendees and described its potential for impact on the Ottawa community. After the project pitches were complete, attendees had a chance to interact with student representatives, ask questions and vote on their favourite project. The event culminated with the presentation of three institution-specific awards (selected by the committee) and one People’s Choice Award (selected by those in attendance).

ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ students Jason Zhang, Caleb Lui-Yee, Triton Crowley, Marwan Zeid and Eric Wang won the institution-specific award for their project H2GO, which they completed as part of their fourth-year Engineering Project course supervised by Lynn Marshall (Department of Systems and Computer Engineering). The project seeks to improve public access to water resources by providing a clear, reliable, user-friendly, mobile-compatible web app that locates public washrooms, water fountains and showers across Ottawa.

Three additional teams from ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ presented their projects:

• Led by students Quinne Cunnane, Omar Hassano and Ben Morissette, and supervised by (Sprott School of Business), the Connecting Communities project developed a proposal for a centralized, data-driven platform that enhances decision-making for city officials, program managers and the general public by offering real-time insights into participation rates and recreational activity availability.
• Led by Simon Jones, Carver White, Marianne El-abras and Kurt Camhit, and supervised by (Sprott School of Business), the Rebuilding Our Trust in Transit project aims to identify transit user groups in the city who are highly reliant on or under-served by public transit in order to inform recommendations that will increase transit reliability and overall ridership.
• Led by Kiera Vath and supervised by Tracey Lauriault (School of Journalism and Communication), the project Shared Spaces, Shared Plates promotes food preservation of Ottawa’s summer harvest through canning and food preservation workshops, while also building awareness about community gardening through newsletters and events.

This academic year, 317 ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ students participated in CSO projects matched with 22 city employees. The projects were integrated into 12 classes taught by nine instructors from nearly every faculty (Faculty of Public and Global Affairs, Sprott, Engineering and Design, and Science). In total, 1,033 students from ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, the University of Ottawa and Algonquin College participated in CSO projects.

Members of the ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ community can learn more about the innovative work happening through CityStudio Ottawa on the , or by signing up for our mailing list or visiting the CSO poster display in the Future Learning Lab starting in August.