Academic News

Skills Canada National Competition (June 1-2, 2017)

The 2017 Skills Canada National Competition continued its ongoing objective of highlighting the importance of the nine Essential Skills commonly used in skilled trade and technology careers.

Essential Skills was one of the highlights of the two-day competition. Students and guests engaged in hands-on challenges, presentations, and interactive activities intended to increase awareness of the Essential Skills. In 2017, SCC gave special emphasis to Working with Others.

video credit: Skills Canada (Gloo Studios/Range Road Media)

RRC: from Preparations to Event Proper

RRC Skills Appreciation BBQ (June 15, 2017)

After the very successful culmination of the 2017 Skills Canada Competition that was held in the RBC Convention Centre Winnipeg last June 1-2, 2017, Staff, Managers, and Executives alike came together to celebrate.

After all the hard work, dedication, and commitment of everyone who was part and parcel of the preparations for the big event, a BBQ celebration was hosted by the leadership at the RRC Greenhouse last June 15, 2017.

Prior to this project, potential vendors had to email staff with products or services they wished to sell and staff had to enter data manually into their online store as vendors have no way of registering with the website or tracking their sales or products/services.

Vendors can now register an account with Penguin & Stone online. An easy to use electronic form was created for submitting products/services with Penguin and Stone which now allows for all products/services to be uploaded into the online store automatically with portals to view their products/services and orders.

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No more waiting room anxiety! Autonomy Health is a privatized telemedicine platform that allows patients to communicate with online medical practitioners in the comfort of their own homes. Our users will be able to communicate with the practitioners through an embedded web video chat where they can explain their conditions or concerns. They will also be able to look at previous consultations and their current medications.

We are responsible for creating the very foundation of this new project. Our objective is to develop the main features of this web application and create the website to access this application. Since this application may deal with sensitive data, our task also includes researching compliance when dealing with medical data from our web host to our database.

The Manitoba Genealogical Society currently has a website where users can search curate cemetery records. Currently, they have volunteers who record the cemetery transcriptions on paper, which is a lot of work and can cause inaccuracies.

The updated website will provide:

An easier process for recording cemetery transcriptions.

A more updated Entity Relationship Diagram so future developers can more easily understand the structure of the project.

The ability for volunteers to create a formatted
report of cemetery transcriptions.

The Windows application will increase the efficiency of the recording process in regards to
readability compared to handwritten records. The application will also add the functionality to upload records in bulk to the database.

Currently, the data for the Spence Neighborhood Association is tracked in
many different formats. Aggregating the data for reporting is tedious and time
consuming. Volunteers are using an arduous paper and manual recording process to track
participant and volunteer attendance, making the data disorganized and inaccurate.

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Mortgage Bidder is Canada’s first mortgage interest rate marketplace. Whether you are in the market for a brand new house or looking to renew or refinance, Mortgage Bidder is designed to help users find the lowest rate.

When using the Mortgage Bidder website, users need to be able to perform mortgage calculations without leaving the website.The main goal of this project is to develop many different kinds of online calculators that will help users fully understand the numbers before making commitments. Clients will be able to know everything they need using these calculators before buying.

Innovine is a website that provides a space to steward ideas and innovations from all levels.

Senior leaders will have the ability to clearly define the issue they want solved.

The ideas going forward that have been approved will be visible to all teams, so that stakeholders will be able to track thinking and concepts across the organization.

Students created a web-based application to enhance the current process of collecting food bank related information.

The collection of information for the Hunger Count Report is made easier with forms that
are filled out with a couple of clicks. A report summary can also be generated automatically so statistics about clients can be viewed at a glance.

The Nursing Department held our annual Curriculum Day on June 5th. The day included discussions, activities, and networking opportunities. Faculty reflected on what we’re doing, where we’re going, and how we can continue to improve our curriculum for our students.

A wide range of topics were discussed, including indigenous culture, wound care, and the health impact of pornography. The presentations were interesting and thought provoking. For some faculty, the presentations built on prior knowledge, while other faculty were introduced to important new concepts.

Curriculum Day offers the Nursing department an opportunity to connect, as we see the way our individual courses intersect and build on each other within the larger programs we teach in. The day also provides an avenue for theory and clinical instructors to meet, discuss, and discover the important connections between theory and practice. Curriculum Day is an integral staff development opportunity that benefits not only Nursing faculty, but our students as well.

Currently CanU does all their attendance tracking through paperwork and excel spread sheets. This is not only time consuming but can also create error due to misprint in data. Every day after each program, their coordinator has to manually input all attendance for the day into Excel.

Three BTM students developed a custom app in Salesforce for the tracking and updating of users attendance. The application also automatically enrolls students into programs. Users are able to assign students to teams and buses for better organization and reports. Users can query who is on what team and what bus at all times. A complete and customized Salesforce experience for CanU to use. This will reduce downtime and increase accuracy of attendance tracking.