Last Saturday, January 11, Sheridan College was the proud host of the President’s Innovation Challenge.
The event was held in conjunction with Cisco, Fuse Marketing and Soft Gravity — all official partners on the Toronto 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games.
Students were challenged to come up with ideas that could be turned into inventions to enhance the fan experience at the Games and bridge connections between visitors, residents and businesses.
In total, nine teams of Sheridan students participated.
Teams came ready with their ideas and were given dedicated space and time to hone them into workable inventions.
Roving mentors, with experience in law, IT, programming, systems development, marketing/communications and sales visited each of the teams to help them refine their ideas.
The nine teams pitched to a panel of judges, with the top five moving on to the second round.
Each of the top five teams was assigned a dedicated mentor from the participating organizations who helped them solidify their concepts.
The top five made their final pitches to a new panel of judges, with representation from Sheridan, TORONTO 2015, and Cisco.
The winning team, “Fantastic Four”, received $10,000, the bulk of which will be used to develop their app, in time for an April 2015 launch to support the Games.
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Fantastic Four – The winning team
The judges were extremely impressed by the quality and relevance of all the ideas presented.
The full list of teams and projects is detailed below:
Team Name: SMA
Team members: Ryan O’Keefe, Anne Decena, Eric Burley and Nick Menze
Description:
Our team’s belief is that the best way to enhance the viewing experience of the Pan Am games will be to make the events as accessible as possible to the people. Our idea is to create a website encompassing different information from transportation apps such as ‘Lyft’ and ‘Uber’ as well as local transit information from ‘GO’ and ‘Zum’ to give fans access to transportation to get to their favorite events.
Team: Creation Link
Team Members: Myra Morris, Jen Lewis
Description:
Through local communities, through schools, rec centres, etc. all over Canada will be encouraged to hold sporting events through competitions in different sports representative of the PanAm games. These competitions will be videotaped and put on an official Youtube channel for the PanAm games where people can regularly watch videos as they are posted.
Team: Fantastic Four
Team Members: Chau Le, Jason Smith, Leena Salem, Yee Ting Lee
Description:
Excuse Me TO is a free social geotracking app that visitors use on their smart phones to view the locations of volunteers, athletes and Pan Am representatives. The app allows visitors to find them using a real-time map on their smartphone where they can also view the languages spoken by these individuals. The intention of Excuse Me TO is to connect visitors to the games and region, by providing face to face contact in their language.
Team: KAOS
Team Members: Tristan Kong, Jodi Harvey, Victoria Hoang, Sunaynna Venkatesh, Caitlin Vollum.
Description:
The idea is to create an app that links everything from the Games and the city of Toronto to the athletes as well as the fans. The app will be called – Panagram. The Panagram app will have six apps built into it – a Blog tab, an Online Game tab, a Toronto Hotspots tab, teams roster app, a Bump App for ticket swapping, and a games event listing app.
Team: Pelican
Team Members: Anastacia Brunelle, Jenny Le, Sanja Ratkovic.
Description:
An application will be developed in order to help visitors, residents, and athletes navigate through the streets of Toronto through its interactive map and take advantage of daily deals on local activities, attractions and restaurants in order to enhance the Pan Am/Parapan experience.
Team: SEA
Team Members: Hargurdeep Singh, Hituvan Lachhar, Jaskaran Sadheora.
Description:
The idea is to Design and Fabricate 51 metal coins at Sheridan College. Each of the coins will incorporate the added substance fabrication (Three-Dimensional Printing) methodology. There are 51 separate games occurring in TO2015 – each head coach of the respective Canadian sports team will be provided with a coin. At the closure of the Games, the Canadian Team will choose which opponent group merits the Sportsmanship Coin.
Team: SoftTings
Team Members: Sachith Jayasundara, Saachi Badola, Daniel Dao
Description:
The idea is to design an HTML5-based web application, “PanAmic”, that is accessible by any mobile device. The app will highlight the region’s hangouts and the events of the Games and their athletes. It will also integrate social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and FourSquare, to allow for sharing of the experience with friends and the opportunity to meet new ones.
Team: Sheridan T&T
Team Members: Nigel D’Souza, Mara Buda, Spence Copeland.
Description:
Merging with technology and getting the use of internet, we have come up with an idea to connect fans with their favourite games as well as getting the local community involved.
Team: Work in Progress
Team Members: Ali Tayyebi, Deron Li, Riley Co, Kaye Mao.
Description:
An mobile/web application that allows participants to show support for athletes through voting. This provides opportunities for sponsorships from local and global businesses as well as garner data that will be used to create interactive display for large touch screens in the various stadiums.
