University Challenge Winners 2019

March 2019 marked the second annual University Challenge. The competition invites students from universities across Ontario to host an event or series of events during NEM and a chance to win one of three cash prizes: $3000 for first place, $1500 for second place, and $750 for third place.

This year, the NEM 2019 Challenge featured 14 student teams from 11 different universities. An impressive total of 31 events were run by the student teams during National Engineering Month in March.

The events were scored on Effectiveness of Messaging, Integration of NEM theme and visual elements and Participant Engagement and the rankings were determined by the National Engineering Month Ontario Steering Committee.

Congratulations to all the teams and a big thank you for all their efforts!

University Challenge Winners and Ranking!

1st Place

Global Engineering Week

University of Toronto

Team Members:  Philip Lu, Henry Zhang, Jennie Hu and Morris Huang

Global Engineering Week (GE Week) – University of Toronto is a week-long initiative in March that exposes engineering students from all disciplines to global issues and multidisciplinary thinking through course curriculum, student-run events, a speaker panel, and a hackathon. At the University of Toronto, the week kicked off with the speaker panel, where an engineer, business professional, and executive from a major development organization discussed the applications of Big Data and AI to global development. Students had a chance to participate in Q&A and connect with the speakers over refreshments. 

Throughout the week, GE Week partnered with over 30 engineering courses at U of T to include global development examples during lectures to expose students to global applications of their courses. The GE Fair was a day of interactive activities aimed at raising awareness about sustainability in engineering. The week culminated in the GE Week Hackathon, where over 150 engineering students will tackle the problem of improving access in remote communities in Canada through innovative technology, under the guidance of mentors from NGOs and the tech industry.

2nd Place

Biobuddy

University of Ottawa

Team Members: Rachel Cohen, Allison Tolgyesi, Hunter Marriott, Alexandra Johnson and Khatra Badreldin

Bio-Buddy challenges undergraduate and graduate students from across Canada to design and build an infant CPR training manikin while meeting set criteria. The competition offers students valuable experiences such as working in teams and designing, building and debugging solutions for an open-ended problem. These skills will be essential to their future careers as engineers and there are currently very few opportunities for engineering students to apply design ideas to the biomedical domain. The competition will additionally serve as a platform to highlight and acknowledge student accomplishments and create a product that will impact the well-being of Canadians.

Bio-Buddy Biomedical Engineering Design Competition was hosted at the end of March 2019 at the University of Ottawa.

3rd Place

Project #Include

University of Toronto

Team Members: Afifa Saleem, Ipsita Bhargava, Negar Balaghi and Matthew Choi 

Lack of resources, high costs for STEM programs and unavailability of mentors in Toronto’s 31 priority neighborhoods may create barriers for youth from potentially pursuing STEM professions. To reduce this disparity in exposure, Project Include provided a series of free half-day beginner coding workshops at schools and community centers in March 2019. The workshops introduced coding through age-appropriate activities in Scratch (grades 3-6) and HTML/CSS (grades 7-8). In total, 10 workshops were provided for grades 3-10 students at schools and 5 workshops were provided for immigrant and newcomer youth at community center locations. In the short term, these workshops attracted  students to enroll in Project Include’s free coding boot-camps in Summer 2019 across the city. In the long term, these workshops will expose students to the possibilities that coding brings allowing them the opportunity to choose a STEM field, if they wish to do so.

Other Participating Teams

UniversityEvent Name
CarletonGlobal Engineering Youth Summit
LakeheadMall Event
McMasterMcMaster EWB Global Engineering Conference
Queen’sTrivia Night at Clark
Ryerson3D Printing
RyersonEarth Rangers Tour
UOITIf you can build it!
UOITTechnology with UOIT Women in Engineering
WaterlooGlobal Engineering Week
WesternWWC Career Showcase
WindsorHigh School Design Competition

We would like to encourage all teams planning to return to the challenge for NEM 2020 to use this information as a resource to continue to build and strengthen your events!