Project Spotlight: Waterloo Wellington Children’s Groundwater Festival (WWCGF)
Our team is partnering with the Waterloo Wellington Children’s Groundwater Festival (WWCGF) to create a custom mobile application for the festival. Right now, the festival organizers have a hard time disseminating essential information to their 250+ teachers and 1000+ volunteers, which actually causes quite a few issues (e.g. logistics, safety) given that the event attracts over 5000 children every year. We want to tackle this communication barrier with our project and enhance the festival experience for the attendees so that the children get the most learning out of it.
What’s your vision for your project?
The main purpose of the festival is to educate children about the importance of groundwater and topics such as water conservation, protection, and science. As such, our goal at the end of the day is to have the teachers, organizers, and especially children learn more from attending the festival with the help of the app. Also, the WWCGF is actually one of 25+ water festivals in Ontario overseen by the Children’s Water Education Council. This project is the first of its kind among all the festivals, so if it is well-received by the festival attendees, then we could potentially scale it to be applicable for all the other festivals too.
What are some challenges you’re facing?
We decided to build our frontend in React Native and our backend in Node.js. The biggest challenge for our team is that some of our team members came in without knowing too much JavaScript. So, the biggest challenge is definitely finding the time to learn the tech and meet our sprint goals while juggling all the other responsibilities of being university students. It’s tough at times, but we have a super dedicated group that will work hard to get the job done.
What’s your favourite place to get work done as a team?
Everyone on our team is pretty flexible with regards to where we work. The Spring 2017 team worked in Modern Languages, which is small but cozy. There’s also a lot of natural light in our room, so that’s always nice! The Winter 2018 team likes to work in the empty classrooms in the Science Teaching Complex where there are blackboards to brainstorm ideas and power outlets for our laptops.
What’s your favourite team bonding moment?
We recently had a team retro and that helped put us back on track after a rough past 2 weeks (midterms, interviews, etc.). We were able to lay out our problems and help each other come up with tangible solutions to implement. There was definitely a lot of support during that process and a lot of solid ideas put forward, so we’ll definitely continue to do team retros going forward.
The Winter 2018 top bonding moments were when we went out for food and drinks during our team socials. We had half-price wings at the Bombshelter Pub, bubble tea and board games at Sweet Dreams Tea Shop, and awesome Korean food at the Famous OWL of Minerva!
What surprised you about your team?
Everyone on our team comes from a different background and it’s very cool to hear everyone’s different interests, passions, opinions, and ideas. For example, one member studies psychology but is also a designer and rad hip-hop dancer. Another member enjoys travelling, while yet another likes anime. Despite our different programs of study and tech backgrounds, we feel united because we all believe in Blueprint’s mission of building tech for social good. We live by the motto of work hard play hard, and are having a great time doing both so far.
