Students making an impact on the community during their time at the University of Waterloo.
We've all seen these headlines around campus. It's part of what gives us our unique signature as an institution. But most of these stories come in the form of faculty research and participation, and exceptional co-op placements; not commonly through IST.
Enter Zhenghan Li, Mengfan Wang, Jared McDonald and Lingyun Li. These fourth-year Management Engineering students were initially connected with Athletics to build an application for their capstone design project around the Move Your Mind (MYM) program.
Move Your Mind
MYM is a referral-based wellness initiative supported by the Department of Athletics and Recreation, and Health Services. The program is designed to help students gain the physical, mental and emotional health benefits of physical activity, primarily by removing any barriers that may prevent them from staying active and participating in recreational activities.
The MYM team recognized that their application would need to be hosted on University of Waterloo infrastructure so they initially reached out to Greg Smith, Director, Departmental and Campus Applications. After an initial discussion in the fall of 2017, Greg recommended Portal as a possible platform to develop and distribute the application.
Portal and MYM
Portal was launched in 2014 as a responsive web application designed to provide students with the personalized information they need, right when they need it. As development of Portal continued, work simultaneously began a software development kit (SDK) with the idea being: why not allow a campus full of smart, ambitious and entrepreneurial individuals the opportunity to build their own ideas directly into Portal? After listening to student feedback, the Portal team also planned the development of native app versions for both iOS and Android, which were subsequently launched in 2016.
When Portal was suggested as a platform, the MYM team was somewhat skeptical about its ability to support the functionality and complexity needed to implement their proposed solution. After all, even though they were all aware of Portal, the team had only used it for comparatively simpler tasks like looking up empty classrooms and finding the latest geese nests on campus. The team's lowered expectations of what they might be able to build in Portal were completely changed once they met with the Portal development team for the first time. "All team members were familiar with the Portal applications, however we were not aware of its potential," said MYM member Jared McDonald. "After discussing with the team, we were able to see that Portal was much more capable than we initially thought and I believe our designed widget proves this."
Dedication and hard work lead to amazing results
While the SDK had been used in previous Hackathon events, the MYM project was the first attempt to use it to the advanced scale of what the MYM team had planned. With this in mind, the Portal team became quite invested in the success of the MYM project and its team members. The project started in earnest in January 2018 when all members returned from their final coop terms. The primary goal of the Portal team was to provide strong mentorship and support to the team of engineering students. One of the key priorities from the start was encouraging as much communication as possible between the two teams. Weekly check in meetings were setup to discuss roadblocks and answer questions. A Mattermost group was created to facilitate communication in a quick and lightweight manner. McDonald recalled, "Even when our team members posted questions as late as 9:00 pm on a weekday, we were provided with a response within 15 minutes!"
Finally, on a sunny Friday morning in March, the MYM team proudly showed off the Move Your Mind widget as part of the Management Engineering Capstone Design Symposium. And like proud parents watching their kids grow up and cross the graduation stage, the Portal team stood alongside watching the MYM team explain their ideas and implementation in Portal to hundreds of interested spectators.
While the Portal team acted as mentors throughout the project, we also learned a tremendous amount that will help us to improve Portal moving forward. But perhaps the biggest insight was gained by observing what can happen when you take a group of incredible students and give them a powerful, flexible platform to carry out their innovative ideas.
