ESTEVAN - The computer science training through projects program at the Â鶹´«Ã½AVeast College continues to make strides.
The 150 delegates who attended the Â鶹´«Ã½AVeast Techhub's Critical Resources and Innovative Technologies (CRIT) conference at the college's Estevan campus on April 23 heard more about the computer science program Tania Hlohovsky Andrist, the executive director of innovation and applied research director at the college, told the crowd the program started about a year ago with the intent of solving local problems through applied research.
She added the centre believed strongly in collaborative relationships to make the program happen.
"We have many partners and supporters in the room," said Hlohovsky Andrist.
Student presentations play a key part in the computer science program, she told the crowd, because they're part of the curriculum that shares knowledge.
At that point, Hlohovsky Andrist introduced Ryan Gustafson, who is the instructor, program developer and research co-ordinator, and student Allister Watson.
Gustafson told the crowd the program works by teaching students through real-world projects. They talk to industry partners and organizations to solve problems, and it gives the students a meaningful way to learn computer science and programming.
"It was just really designed to have the student in mind. We can meet them where they're at. They might be brand new to computers, and we can meet them and provide training to them where they're at, or they can have an advanced degree in computer science, and we can build on their skills," said Gustafson, who described the program as a fun one to teach.
Watson, who has been part of the program for nearly a year, then discussed a solar panel data engineering project that they have been working on that will create a dashboard to explain the information. They use the solar panels at the front entrance to the Estevan campus. They have been there for a while, but nobody knew how well they were working, he said.
"We figured that we would collect that data, and then we could analyze it, and look for any potential problem with the panels. From there, we could then look at the solutions, try those out, and see what happens. For this, we build everything up right from the panels themselves," Watson.
A smart logger in the building collects data from the panels and is connected to a Raspberry Pi, which is a small, low-cost, single-board, handheld computer which then stores the data and communicates a weather audio video interleave, so that when they're taking the solar data, they can track the weather and the associated information.
Communication was one of the biggest challenges they encountered. Different hardware devices need to connect to each other, and it was a challenge to get them to communicate effectively. It was also difficult to know what to ask for from information technology.
"Then we had a complex project, and some different team members working on it, and there were times where we had a miscommunication where people would develop some feature or work on code that would step on each other's toes," said Gustafson. "What we really focused on for this class was improving that communication and just working on those skills to tackle those challenges effectively."
Watson then demonstrated the dashboard. It showed the temperature, the amount of power produced, a rough description of the weather and other information. A button will eventually have an audio tutorial to walk people through the dashboard. A second tab is for the graph.
"That will represent whichever data sets the user chooses and for however much time they've chosen. You can have anywhere from one day of data to all of the data we've ever collected. You can set it to show specific values, all compared to each other," said Watson.
Data is collected every five minutes.
In the future, Watson said they hope to get the power usage from SaskPower to compare it to the production and see the difference. They also want to take the information on past production and see where they're heading in the future. Eventually, they hope the dashboard can be posted for visitors to the college.
