Engineering Students Deliver Improved Rehabilitation Cart

In October of 2009 Craig Deitering, a senior in the Computer Engineering and Systems (CES) program at the Institute of Technology modified a battery powered car for kids so that it could be “driven” by children with limited motor abilities. The project was a success but after the car was used by the kids at Puyallup’s Good Samaritan hospital, several needed improvements were identified.

It was decided that the engineering students in this last academic year’s Devices and Controls class would implement these improvements as a team project.

The project leader for the class team, student Brian Gosch, described the improvements that the team was planning to make to the battery powered car (called the BOSS cart) to Dr. Steve Shores. Dr Shores agreed with the approach. He also went on to list a number of potential senior projects that the students could work on that would help the children's rehabilitation center at the hospital.

Seniors from the Computer Engineering & Systems program at UW Tacoma visited the Children’s Therapy Unit (CTU) at Puyallup’s Good Samaritan hospital to get a first-hand look at how the staff at the unit creates games and tools to help kids with special needs. Steve Shores, who is a CTU therapist there and head of the Assistive Technology Program, demonstrated many of the devices his group has made or modified to help the children.

In the latter part of May, nine students Jessie Fortier, Aakanksha Gaur, Brandon Nadeau, Brian Gosch, Eun Ju Lee, Frank Le, Kris Knabel, Krisnil Gounder and Teddy Doll finished the enhancements and modifications to a BOSS cart for Multicare's Good Samaritan Children's Therapy Unit.

Working with faculty sponsor Robert Gutmann, PhD the student team made the electric vehicle more flexible and targeted for working with children in need of rehabilitation services and treatment. It was Bob Gutmann, the instructor for the class, who made the initial contact with Steve Shores at a CTU fundraising event. Gutmann’s wife, Linda Gutmann, is on the Board of Directors at the hospital and is very familiar with the achievements and needs of the CTU.

With the success of the modifications and the delivery of the new, improved cart, Dr. Gutmann and Dr. Larry Wear, Associate Director of the Institute of Technology at UWT, hope to expand the involvement of CES students with the CTU and get more students to focus their senior capstone design experience on projects that will benefit the CTU.

Congrats to the UWT GreyHat Huskies

The University of Washington Tacoma team of students representing the GreyHat Group here on the campus performed admirably at the third Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition held last weekend. The team, which also helped to prepare others for the event, came in second out of a group of outstanding competitors.

Pictured: The Director for the Center of Excellence in Information Assurance and Cybersecurity, Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, commands attention.

Congratulations and thanks should also be given to Don McLane (who also provided the pictures), Barbara Endicott-Popovsky (CIAC Chair) and faculty member Yan Bai (Assistant Professor who teaches Computer Networks,Network Management,Information Assurance, Computer and Network Security) for their work in preparing the students and participating in the event.

Here is the news from Grey Hat team member Parker Thompson:

Our team this year at PRCCDC worked really hard and came in second place beating every other team except UW seattle engineering! I would to thank all of our team members, those who observed the red team, Dr. Yan Bai, and everyone else who helped use make this a success. Our team members this year included myself on the email server and the router, Jesse Morgan for the first day on the router, Kimberly Harvey on the Website and Database, Teddy Vitro and Hai Nyguyen on client machines and as team mangers, Brain van on the internet machine, Aaron Offerdahl on the backtrack machine, and Robert Kesterson on the domain controller.

This student organization also helped the International Conference on E-Crime that was held late last year in Tacoma a success. Of course, as any hard working Institute of Technology student group would, they are already planning for more activities.

We have many exciting plans for the future of the club such as more collaboration with other teams (particularly the winning uw seattle team and devry), to continue to work to make our lab setup closer to the of the ccdc, and setting up a vpn into our lab setup so students at home and students at other schools can still use the lab network.

Thank you again to everyone,

Parker Thompson

Congratulations again, and good luck with building out an excellent lab space for future competitions.

Following the Job Hunt on Tweetajob

The managing recruiter for a large (to be unnamed) holding company of a technology icon was a guest speaker in my class on Wednesday. The topic was on effective ways to recruit and retain employees to a growing technology company. Michele has been to the class on several occasions during the last few years and always draws great questions and gives solid, valuable advice.

Because so many of the students come to me for direction on how to go about finding employment after they graduate, not only is the information pertinent to the business plan they are required to develop as part of the course, but it also is great guidance for when the students themselves are searching for employment.

One thing that surprises me on occasion is when a student, often who is getting ready to graduate in a quarter or so, comes into my office and starts with this question: Do I know of any job openings? I am not fond of this introductory question, because it arrives without any background information to go with it. Job openings where? What are you interested in doing? Where have you looked? What companies do you want to work for? What locations are manageable for you? What is your favorite color? (maybe not that).

I also hear on occasion a tone of disappointment that their search has gone of for weeks with no or only a couple of interviews. On digging, I find that they have submitted resumes online to only a handful of companies and that they are still waiting to hear back from them. A successful job hunt generally requires a more deliberate and sustained approach.

I am happy and pleased to be able to help where I can when they come to see me. The first thing I tell them to do is to take that large market of jobs that are available (there is a large market, but in down times they are sometimes harder to find) and narrow them down to a specific prospect pool. This is still several hundred companies to draw from. Then I ask them to make a list of the top ten companies from that prospect pool they are most interest in and do some research on them. Then they can apply if they remain interested. They should always have a number of companies they are interested in on that list, even when they have scheduled interviews with others. It should continually be populated as other choices are dropped from the list.

But that is not the point of this post.

They point is that Michele gave a simple suggestion that made a great deal of sense to me. Once you have established the companies with which you think you would like to work for...

Follow them on Twitter.

In fact, if you are looking now, immediately create a List on Twitter and start following you personal list of companies. You may hear of job openings from the tweets, you will gather intelligence on the companies you are interested in and you will get a feel for how they are regarded by their employees and customers.

There is another site that you should look into. Tweetajob.

What is Tweetajob?

Tweetajob is a web based platform that interacts with Twitter, allowing recruiters to efficiently tweet jobs. Because our site allows jobseekers to specify location and career interest, you only receive those job tweets that interest you. Jobseekers can elect to receive job postings via Twitter feed, through the Tweetajob search engine or via mobile devices, according to personal preferences. Recruiters pay to post their jobs to Tweetajob.

There are a number of sites and services out there, from Craigslist to Monster.com.

With the two suggestions above, there is another online tool to add to your arsenal in the hunt for a job.

Technology Company Profiles

During the course of the year, I will be highlighting technology companies of various sizes and solutions that are located here in Tacoma and the South Puget Sound. So far their are six profiles on the blog.

Hopefully, by the end of the year, there will be 53 companies profiled. When it comes time for you to think about internships or job opportunities, this should provide an ample starting point for you to begin investigating possibilities.

You can view the profiles exclusively by going to the label "Tech Company Profiles" or you can view the list of those companies that were profiled in a linked list that will continue to grow throughout the year.

Startup Weekend Recap and Primer

When the decision was made to try to hold something like a Startup Weekend it was meant to be a dry run. Recruitment for the weekend was done through blogging alone and a few direct email inquiries of those who had mentioned an interest in the past.

The location was great, given Suite133's experience in hosting the earlier technology based "unconference" called barcampTacoma.

There were two outcomes on the attendance side that concerned me. If we had less than 12 participants I was going to be disappointed, if we had more than 30 I am not sure how I would have handled the logistics.

On Friday night, we had 16 people participate. A few of them made it clear that they were unable to come for the full weekend and just wanted to join in on the first night of discussion. I am glad they came. Given the size of the crowd, everyone was able to introduce themselves and talk a little bit about what they could contribute.

By 7:00pm we were suggesting potential business ideas, with an understanding that there had to be the chance that it could be launched over the next two days. Ten ideas were discussed, which was a good amount. We then voted on the favorites form that ten. Of those five were pretty even in the voting so we held a second vote. One idea which was pretty popular had a second idea, which was more of a feature than a product or a business was folded under another that was a broader solution.

Critical to the final selection was feasibility for completing at least a prototype, so though one idea was popular, another made a great deal more sense.

Here is where we were very lucky. In order to successfully create anything, the talent to do so had to be in the room and ready to work. We had marketing, business planning, design and development experience represented at the Suite. There were four people with ties to the Institute of Technology at UWT, not counting myself. Two alumni of the Computer Science program and two current students.

David Hazel, alumni of the program and veteran of three official Startup Weekends was key to making things work. Not only was he able to give us guidance on how we were doing and what to expect in the next couple of days, but he was well versed in Drupal, a web content management system with enough open source elements that we could create a web site with much of the functionality we were looking for.

Another thing that David prepared us for was the drop off in attendance, which given those who had already mentioned their lack of availability was not a surprise.

On Saturday we spent our time discussion the build out of the idea as a business, how they a Startup Weekend generally handled ideas such as ownership and went to work building the site.

A total of 12 people participated in the second day, with the nice folks from Spryng came by to talk about there entrepreneurial support efforts and to discuss their upcoming conference.

David trained several of the other participants in how to build with Drupal, and on Sunday, six folks worked to get it done.

At the end of the weekend, a working prototype was completed, including some Flash animation in a subsection of the site. Was it launched? No. It needs to complete the remaining implementation of a couple of the features and needs to be given a facelift to better represent the target audience it is aimed at.

The team set up a Wave thread to keep it moving forward, and there is a hope to bring it into the public eye when that is done. It needs to be populated with data and then it is ready to go.

It was a rewarding opportunity to meet and work with great people, to learn about new tools and technology and to gain the experience of what a Startup Weekend is like. Hopefully Clint Nelson and the folks from the official Startup Weekend organization can help us pull off an even bigger event in the late Summer.