Students in the Knowledge Integration Senior Honours Project course (a two-term course, INTEG 420 A & B) research and develop a thesis, design or creative project under the mentorship of a faculty member with relevant expertise. The project culminates in a written deliverable, a public poster and a flash talk presentation.
The students will present summaries of their projects on Friday, March 20 starting at 2:30 p.m. at the Knowledge Integration Symposium 2026.
Projects from prior years may be found at: 2025 projects | 2024 projects | 2023 projects | 2022 projects | 2021 projects | 2020 projects | 2019 projects | 2018 projects | 2017 projects | 2016 projects | 2015 projects | 2014 projects | 2013 projects | 2012 projects
Legal Standing for the Silenced: Reimagining Legal Status for Captive Entertainment Animals in Canada
Alia Nanji
Legal standing, the right to bring an action in court, is a growing topic of discussion in the field of animal rights law. With the present federal legislation defining animals as property, institutions such as zoos, aquariums, and circuses cannot effectively be held accountable for the treatment of animals in their care. In numerous cases, entertainment animals suffer from prolonged confinement, isolation, and inadequate living conditions. When cases of neglect arise, advocates such as animal rights organizations lack an efficient legal pathway to challenge those responsible for the animals’ suffering. Despite the consensus among experts that the current animal protection systems must be reformed, extending legal standing to captive entertainment animals has been insufficiently explored within the Canadian legal system.
By engaging in a literature review of existing case law, parliamentary debates, and scholarly commentary on the legal status of animals, this project concludes that legal standing is a necessary structural reform, but that granting it alone would be ineffective without foundational reforms. Accordingly, this project proposes a three-tiered model for implementation. The model begins with groundwork to build public support, progresses through the alignment of provincial inspection and enforcement systems, and concludes with federal Criminal Code amendments that formally recognize animals’ legally protected interests and grant them legal standing. Ultimately, by situating legal standing within a tiered proposal, this project contributes to evolving debates on the future direction of animal welfare law in Canada.
Designing for Dignity: Montessori-Inspired Arts Engagement for Individuals Living with Dementia
Kavya Srinivasan
Traditional dementia care settings often prioritize safety and routine. While essential, these structures can limit opportunities for autonomy, creativity, and self-directed engagement. Research shows that Montessori-based programming emphasizes choice, independence, and meaningful activity. When combined with structured arts activities, this approach can improve mood, social interaction, and cognitive stimulation for people living with dementia. Despite this evidence, there is little practical design work that intentionally integrates these approaches for everyday care practice.
This project evaluates dementia care models to identify gaps in autonomy-driven and creative engagement. Observation and feedback from a local Montessori school and memory care facility highlight the benefits of arts-based activities for supporting cognitive function, fine motor skills, and meaningful participation. Insights from this research informs a human-centered approach to creating an engaging set of activities for individuals living with dementia.
For the final deliverable, a customizable, Montessori and dignity-focused arts activity set is designed and prototyped to adapt to varying cognitive and physical abilities. For example, reusable watercolour pages appear blank when dry but reveal vibrant images with just a brush of water. This is a mess-free, simple to use, and engaging activity for individuals with minimal fine motor skills. An accompanying implementation booklet provides activity examples and descriptions. Together, these materials demonstrate how intentional, Montessori-informed arts design can enhance dignity, independence, creativity, and meaningful engagement in a variety of dementia care settings.
From Guided Journaling to Psychoeducation: Designing MindMate to Improve Help-Seeking Intentions Among Athletes
Liam MacArthur
Athletes often face sport-specific stressors, such as an elevated risk of anxiety and depressive symptoms, yet help-seeking intentions remain low due to stigma and limited mental health literacy. This paper reports on the process of low-fidelity prototyping MindMate, an athlete-oriented large language model system that is not intended to replace therapy or clinical care. MindMate uses guided journaling to support psychoeducation and resource navigation by eliciting athletes’ experiences in their own words. It provides structured follow-up prompts to encourage reflection and elaboration. A large language model-based system supports adaptive prompts and interpretation of journal responses, enabling the identification of symptom consistent language (e.g. repeating performance anxiety in practice contexts) strictly without making diagnostic claims. When a symptom pattern is flagged, MindMate uses a retrieval-augmented generation framework to provide psychoeducational content from a curated vector database. The symptoms and examples of mental health concerns in which they commonly appear are described. An emphasis is placed on wording messages to help reduce perceived isolation (e.g. highlighting that similar experiences are commonly reported by athletes) alongside outlining pathways to appropriate professional resources; strict system prompt design ensures early crisis detection and guidance. This paper outlines design suggestions for the journaling-to-psychoeducation pipeline MindMate follows and proposes an evaluation agenda focused on user experience, perceived safety, mental health literacy outcomes, and potential changes in help-seeking intentions among athlete users.
Teaching Identity Development Through Play: A Game Theory Workshop for Grade 10 Students
Madeline McDonnell
Interest-based identity development is the process of understanding your values, articulating them, and integrating them into society. It is a critical skill that is formed throughout your life but especially during adolescence, as it strengthens problem-solving, decision-making and resilience. However, despite the undeniable benefits, the Ontario Curriculum does not address it head-on. Therefore, my workshop was created to address this gap in pedagogy. The learning goal for this workshop, designed for grade 10 students in civics and careers, is to teach students how to integrate both an individual's interests and societal interests when they don't fully align. This includes analyzing how interests are represented in their communities and proposing courses of action to address any differences.
Research shows that by teaching students these skills, students will feel more prepared for life after they graduate and decrease their stress levels. This is significant because it will strengthen their understanding of themselves and how they fit in society, making them feel ready for life after high school. The workshop includes play-based pedagogy as the main form of learning through mini games, structured around a game theory concept called Prisoner’s Dilemma – a type of social action problem. I followed a three-part lesson plan and connected it to the current course curriculum, so this lesson has a higher chance of being implemented in classes. Finally, the students will create a plan for ordering a pizza with 4-5 constraints to see how these concepts apply to real life.
Building Confidence in Teens and Young Adults Through Home Maintenance Education Workshops
Melissa Osinga
Household maintenance is an integral part of independent adult living that is often omitted from school curriculums. These skills are expected to be learned outside of the classroom within the family or community, however, not all youth have access to the mentorship to learn and practice these essential skills. While there are many existing educational resources available for free online like YouTube, they lack the meaningful hands-on experience needed for teens and young adults to gain confidence in their abilities. This hands-on experience has the greatest effect on low-income earners as outsourcing these tasks is often an insurmountable barrier leading to housing quality disparities.
To address this problem, I designed a workshop for high school and first- and second-year university students that allows them to practise simple maintenance and repair skills in a low-stakes environment. This will assist them in building the confidence necessary to try these tasks in their own lives. The workshop is targeted to prepare students who are entering, or are just about to enter, independent living. It is designed to be accessible for all high school and first- and second-year university students in the Waterloo region, but specifically tailored for low-income underprivileged teenagers and young adults. My final design consists of a workshop and an information booklet. The workshop begins with an introduction that includes building a basic toolkit paired with an opportunity to practise using the basic hand tools. The second section will focus on sewing on a button or changing lightbulbs in various light fixtures.
The Unseen Ecology: Redefining Ecological Belonging in the Urban University
Melissa Valad
Today’s world faces a climate crisis, and if we are going to address it adequately we need to develop pro-environmental behaviour at all levels of society. Although many people claim to hold environmental values, such as sustainability, their actions don’t always reflect them — this is known as the value-action gap. I propose bridging this gap by strengthening people’s environmental value from a personal, place-based context through acknowledgement of the socio-ecological relationships that often go unnoticed within daily life. The extinction of everyday experience with nature, compounded by a narrow conceptualization of what nature is, diminishes people's affinity for the natural world and undermines the development of environmental values. Drawing on phenomenological inquiry and Bloom’s Affective Taxonomy, this project centers ecological belonging as a foundation for environmental value. To this end, I am developing a workshop that invites participants to observe and respond to the nature around them, expand their conceptualization of nature to include urban and designed ecosystems, and engage with local community ecosystem services.
In the workshop, participants can foster grounded environmental values through place-based ecological connections. The workshop is inclusive of all students, staff and faculty within the University of Waterloo. The learning objectives are twofold: first, participants will identify their attitudes towards nature through concept analysis, and second, they will recognize nature and reflect on the socio-ecological relationship that exists within their lived environment. The primary outcome is for participants to develop environmental value from a sense of place and a motivation to embark on a variety of social experiences in nature. In addition to the workshop, I am developing a set of materials for key stakeholders to give an opportunity for these activities to be shared with a wider audience. My hope is that people will reconnect and reflect on their relationship with nature to ensure strong environmental values and meaningful action.
Designing a Digital Engagement Framework: Strengthening Community Engagement and Retention in Small Organizations
Mikaela Moyer
Small membership-based organizations depend on strong relationships to remain financially stable, yet many rely on fragmented and informal communication systems that weaken engagement over time. This challenge is especially pronounced in seasonal clubs, where off season communication gaps often lead to reduced participation and long-term member loss.
This project examines The Oxford Hills, a publicly owned golf and country club in southwestern Ontario with over 200 members, as a single in depth case study. It identifies the root causes of off-season disengagement and designs a structured digital engagement framework that strengthens belonging, personalization, and two-way communication. Using a design thinking approach, the work maps current communication gaps, gathers member insights, and defines system requirements for a low resource digital solution.
The final deliverable is an implementation blueprint that outlines the structure of a digital engagement tool. The blueprint includes user needs, feature priorities, communication workflows, and evaluation metrics, presented as a clear framework that guides how the system would function and support member interaction throughout the year. This framework can guide future tool development by The Oxford Hills or be adapted by other small, community-based organizations seeking stronger year-round member retention.
Creating Collaborative Success Through the Lens of Group Entrepreneurship
Nathan Groenewald
Collaboration lies at the heart of modern entrepreneurship, social innovation, and academic work, yet teams often struggle with conflict, ill-defined roles, misaligned expectations, and poor communication. Despite extensive research on group entrepreneurship, there remains a gap in translating these insights into accessible, practical tools that teams can use in real-world settings. This project aims to understand how collaborative teams enhance their effectiveness by translating insights from group entrepreneurship research into practical, design-based tools. The study of group entrepreneurship highlights both the creative potential of teams and the common pitfalls that impact collective success, making it essential to develop strategies that support more effective collaboration.
Drawing on literature from group entrepreneurship, organizational psychology, communication studies, and human-centred design, this project addresses the following question: How are insights from group entrepreneurship translated into practical resources that help collaborative teams work more effectively and avoid common pitfalls? Through this design project, the work provides people with a toolkit that can be implemented in pre-established or newly formed groups to support clearer roles, stronger communication, and more effective collaboration.
Mapping the Gap: Assessing Visitor Engagement and Information Accessibility at the Peter Russell Rock Garden
Ray Kool
The Peter Russell Rock Garden is a geological exhibit at the University of Waterloo's Earth Sciences Museum, and the largest rock garden in Ontario. Despite its prominence, the garden has information access gaps. It lacks clear signage linking to online resources, contributing to low visitor awareness of digital materials. Website users must piece together information from a static garden map, a technical rocks page, and a separate tour script, which are not optimized for self-guided exploration. Finally, no data has been collected on visitor engagement or satisfaction, representing a gap in understanding how the garden is used and valued.
This project evaluates visitor engagement and identifies design interventions to improve access to digital resources using a visitor satisfaction questionnaire administered to the campus community. Following IDEO's design thinking framework, it adapts scales from the Dimensions of Visitor Experience and The Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experience Studies. Items were iteratively refined with museum staff to align with institutional goals and piloted with students.
Findings are analyzed using descriptive statistics, cross-tabulation, and thematic analysis to identify patterns in visitor engagement and interventions for improving the garden's information accessibility. Preliminary results reveal high visitor satisfaction with the physical space but limited awareness of digital resources. The results support the recommendation to develop an interactive wayfinding map and install signage with QR codes linking to the garden's web page. These would bridge the gap between the garden’s physical presence and its digital resources, offering more flexible, self-guided access than the current static map and dispersed web pages and equipping visitors with the tools to engage more fully and independently with the space.
Teaching Students About Neurodiversity: A Toolkit for Grades 4-6 Teachers in Ontario Public School Classrooms
Tesni Greig-Clarke
Neurodiversity is a term originating from disability advocacy communities, as a way to communicate the lived experiences of those with neurological differences and advocate for a more inclusive society. The curriculum of Ontario public school classrooms doesn’t include education on neurodiversity, despite its potential impacts on addressing broader societal stigma, unlocking learning potential in diverse classroom communities, and empowering neurodivergent students. This project aims to address this gap through the design of a toolkit of resources that can be easily implemented in classrooms in Ontario in connection with curriculum strands across Grades 4-6.
To achieve this outcome a research phase was completed, including the review of Ontario curriculum documents, historical and contemporary neurodiversity research, and existing solutions external to Ontario. The design phase of the project was guided by IDEO’s 2012 Design Thinking for Educators framework, including discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation and evolution phases.
The toolkit empowers teachers to feel comfortable teaching about neurodiversity by providing background learning, coaching on how to facilitate conversations about neurodiversity, and connections to existing curriculum requirements. The toolkit contains three engaging classroom activities built around the goals of having students be able to understand the concept of neurodiversity, apply it to themselves and others, and work toward creating a society that is more inclusive for neurodivergent individuals.