The Solar Panels

Red River College solar panels

Designed and installed by Solar Solutions in 2002, the Red River College Exchange District Campus had a solar energy system installed on the side of the Princess building that was, at the time, the largest of its kind in Canada. These environmentally friendly solar panels were installed to provide the college with energy that could be collected from the sun and used by Red River College students and staff. As time passed, these solar panels were left to do their job and were otherwise forgotten about.

Laptop connected to control panel

This past summer (summer of 2015), a team consisting of Haider Al-Saidi, Miguel Guzman and Sylvia Froese set out to find out more about these solar panels. The team wanted to know how much energy was being produced by the panels at what times, what these panels were powering and how they could use this data for educational purposes throughout the college. Read More →

Student Life App

Team Members: Jie Chen, Fiona Grant, Samara Hoffmann, Skye Valde

Goal: Support students’ decisions when coming to Red River College by presenting pertinent information and leading them through a process of LIFE (Living, I [as in me], Finances, and Employment) self-assessment so they can consider how ready they are for college life.
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Team Members: Aaron Bao, Cole Denslow, Samara Hoffman (shared)

Goal: Allow anyone to easily upload static digital images (either flat, two-dimensional images or fully spherical 360-degree panoramas) and overlay clickable “hotspots” to create interactive augmented reality “panos” that can be published and shared over the Web.
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Food & Farm Discovery Centre

Team Members: Parminder Singh, Skye Valde (shared), Chris Xuan

Goal: Staff of the Farm & Food Discovery Centre (FFDC) will be able to easily create and maintain a wide variety of digital content (text, images, video, interactive augmented reality, virtual reality, simulations) that can be delivered via the Web (to any computer or mobile device) or on-site displays and installations. Read More →

A very successful spring and summer project semester (May through August) just wrapped up with our last two Brazilian students heading back home this week. Now a new group of eight BIT students is getting up to speed in the Massey Building (standing, left to right: Skye Valde, Jie Chen, Samara Hoffman, Cole Denslow, Parminder Singh, Aaron Bao; crouched: Chris Xuan; not in photo: Fiona Grant).

Their assignment: three separate fall projects (PanoPlā, Student LIFE App, Food & Farm Discovery Centre). Read More →

Four TOTT skilled trade examples

Apprenticeship Manitoba (AM), a long-time client of Red River College’s Teaching and Learning Technologies Centre (TLTC), dreamed mid-2014 of a game that could engage middle-school kids and introduce them to the world of the skilled trades. The vision was an immersive 3-D virtual world where custom avatars used all kinds of tools and materials to build cool stuff. But with a small budget and only a few months to deliver, it was a tall order. Read More →

This is Miguel, one of the three nerds working on the ACE Technology Corner Project. My responsibility in this project so far has been to obtain all the information that is being received while the solar cells are in operation.
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End of Sprint # 3 and our Brazilian BIT students continue to impress. BIT Space Development’s overarching goal is the delivery of gamified 360-degree panoramas, but its framework’s success hinges on the open-ended set of integrated games and activities that it will house and launch. To reach the broadest possible audience, that impressive collection of learning components (or activity types) is being called PanoPlā (pronounced pano play) and will deploy over the Web to any browser or mobile device. Read More →

Sprint 0 had been short, having only moved into our Massey space on Tuesday, May 5. First priorities were a quick Scrum immersion, settling on some core team tools (like Trello, our virtual Kanban board), and drafting team norms (such as donut preferences – these Brazilians LOVE chocolate glaze). Because our project will only run for four months, the team committed to one-week sprints and the delivery of something usable every Friday. Sprint planning is 10 am every Monday, we hold daily 10 am fifteen-minute scrums, and each Friday ends with a sprint review and retrospective. It was also important during this first week to lay out our broad development objectives and a general technology framework. Essentially, we intend to build a server-based delivery system for gamified 360-degree panoramas. It will support delivery to a desktop via a custom WordPress theme and accompanying plugins, or to mobile devices in the form of apps.   Read More →

Winnipeg in FOCUS is the product of a partnership between the City of Winnipeg Archives, Red River College, and the City of Winnipeg’s Corporate IT Department. In January, 2014, a team of Red River College students in the Business Information Technology Industry Project Course, began developing an application to improve access to the rich collection of photographs held by the Archives. Functional requirements and content were provided by the Archives. Technical mentorship and design services were provided by Corporate IT.

Winnipeg in FOCUS is a web-based application that allows users to search and view photographs and graphic materials held by the City of Winnipeg Archives. At the moment, Winnipeg in FOCUS includes only a fraction of the thousands of images in our holdings. Content will be added as resources allow.

View the archives at Winnipeg in FOCUS