Information technology students showed off their ingenuity at Vancouver Island University’s inaugural Information and Applied Systems Project Fair.
The event, hosted Monday, April 17, featured the work of first- and second-year students, incorporating programming and robotics and a fair degree of mechanical skills. Projects ranged from an automatic irrigation system to a stock market prediction app. Another notable project being demonstrated was a small robot sentry that automatically fires a Nerf bullet when it detects a target.
Throughout the school year, the students worked together and learned the basics of project management and teamwork.
“We have remote-control cars, we have a video game that they’ve created, a camping website. We have all kinds of networking stuff that’s going on,” said Allan McDonald, ITAS program instructor. “Variety is the spice of life.”
The projects counted toward the students’ grades, and at the fair the projects were also eligible for prizes and were judged by McDonald along with David Croft, web and mobile program department chair, and Graham White, chair of systems administration.
Students John Stephenson, Drew Mieras and Ben Pearse were the creators of the robot sentry.
“It’s an object-detecting gun turret,” Mieras said. “It utilizes an ultrasonic sensor to detect objects in front of it.”
Once a target is detected, the sentry pauses and sends a signal to a computer requesting a command to fire which is happily provided by one of the team members. The project took about three months to complete.
“It doesn’t have the greatest range, but I think it’s put up a pretty good fight, so far,” Mieras said.
Students Silas Boon, Nathan Singleton-Polster and Diana Ied created something they call a kinetic sand table, which uses magnets on a home-made graphics plotter to drag a ball bearing through find sand on a flat surface to create designs in the sand. The kinetic sand table is a prototype for a piece of living room furniture such as a coffee table with a layer of sand under glass that would continually be creating new patterns. All the electronics and hardware are contained within the table.
“We’ve got a little website running where we can pick designs from a list … click the draw button … and the ball starts rolling,” Boon said. “The idea is … it can take up the entire table with art … You can do all sorts of really cool mandala art … really cool, intricate art.”
He described the table as “furniture that’s different every time you look at it,” but also conceded that the table’s usefulness doesn’t extend much beyond its aesthetic qualities.
“I mean, it really is impractical,” Boon said. “It doesn’t solve any worldly problem. It’s just fun.”
McDonald said from the start, students showed passion and ability to “dig deep” to make their projects work.
“A few weeks ago I was wondering if some of them would be done, but they all got it done and they all figured it out,” he said.
READ ALSO: Nanaimo-area IT firm looks for local talent to help industries fend off cyberattacks
chris.bush@nanaimobulletin.com
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