2011 DIRTT Innovation Award Recipients
 Please join Applied Research and Innovation Services in congratulating the teams and individuals on their innovative work over the past year.
DIRTT Student Innovation Awards - 2011 recipients This award recognizes students who have achieved a high standard of excellence on an innovative project within their program of study. Project: Firepath Eric Johnston, Monsieur Leigh McAreavy, Jacob Pijanka, Jacobson Winters
Electrical Engineering Technology program, McPhail School of Energy
This directional fire alarm system uses audio and visual signaling to provide direction from every point within a structure towards the nearest available exits. The signaling takes the form of lines of LEDs along the baseboards of a hallway. Each LED will flash, one after another, in a sequence to provide an animated light moving down the path of egress. Tonal audio signaling used in conjunction with the LED sequences provides an alternative signal for the visually impaired. This audio signal should give the impression of a moving source of sound toward the escape route. Reversing the direction of this indication assists firefighters with finding the source of the fire. The system produces the signal by determining the best paths out of a structure around hazards detected by modern heat and smoke detection systems. Project: Den Site Selection using GIS Lawrence Baya
BGIS program, School of Construction
The swift fox, the most burrow-dependent canid in North America, is designated as Endangered under the Alberta Wildlife act, but reintroduction to the province is challenged by habitat fragmentation caused partly by oil and gas development. Policy decisions must balance conservation priorities and development needs in the province. Within this framework, the project investigated areas with high likelihood of locating dens of swift foxes. It incorporated scientific methods with GIS technology to model the species habitat at an area in the southeast corner of Alberta. It further simulated the applicability of the project's outcome in solving a real-world environmental problem by using a least cost path for a "proposed" pipeline development that minimizes ecological impact on the swift foxes. The project shows that environmental stewardship to protect swift fox habitats by development industries can be achieved through sound scientific methods and the use of cutting-edge GIS technology.
DIRTT Technical Implementation Innovation Award - 2011 Recipient
This award honours superior technical implementation of a new concept, process, or idea.  | Joshua Vienneau
Technical Support Coordinator
Centre for Instructional Technology and Development
Project: Desire2Learn Implementation
| This project is a key building block in support of SAIT's core competency of transforming lives by integrating learning with technology. The transition to a new Learning Management System (LMS) is an important step towards increasing faculty readiness, student engagement and overall satisfaction with the SAIT learning experience. A cross functional Learning Management System (LMS) Recommendation Leadership Team was created in December 2008 to select a new LMS vendor. The guiding philosophy was the involvement of system users and operations staff in the evaluation process. Two Advisory teams were formed (User & Operations, and Integration) with a total of 29 representatives from all Schools, CITD, SAITSA, IS, Earned Revenue and the Registrar's Office to support the vendor evaluation and selection process. The recommendation from this team resulted in the negotiation of a vendor agreement for a hosted solution with Desire2Learn in December 2009. The LMS project implementation team was formed in January 2010 and tasked with migrating over 1500 course offerings and 40,000 users from the WebCT 4.1 LMS into the Desire2Learn 8.2 platform. This was one of the largest LMS migration and implementations to take place in North America in 2010. Through the hard work of he project team, faculty and staff, the D2L implementation was on time and budget while achieving overall high satisfaction from the SAIT learning community. SAIT's Desire2Learn implementation has since been recognized by Desire2Learn as a "model LMS implementation" and now serves as a gold-standard reference for other post-secondary LMS implementations.
DIRTT Trailblazer Staff Innovation Award - 2011 Recipient
This award honours visionaries who chart new territories and demonstrate "out of the box" thinking.  | Marc Bussiere
Instructor, School of Construction
Project: Pana Project | Marc Bussiere has worked tirelessly to initiate pioneering international curriculum projects in the School of Contruction. In 2008, he helped create a semester exchange program with Boxhill TAFE in Melbourne, Australia, for the Architectural Technologies (AT) program. He also participated in a successful architectural history tour of Chicago for AT students.Marc recently instigated a study exchange between nine AT students and eighteen Architecture students at Selcuk University in Konya, Turkey. This May, these students will come together in Turkey for an architectural history tour and collaborative study program.
In 2010, Marc embraced a request by two AT students for directed study for their capstone project and initiated a pilot project in humanitarian design for the AT program. The student initiative became the Pana Project, the design and eventual build of a trade school for teaching marketable skills to the impoverished Mayan people of Panajachel, Guatemala. Marc has overseen the students' research since the summer of 2010, often working on his own time, meeting with their project sponsor and experts in international development. He and his students now sit on the Architecture for Humanity Steering Committee, which is helping them see the Pana Project through to final design, fundraising and build state. Marc is now working to bring together various programs in the School of Construction for study abroad and practicum opportunities in Panajachel. He has been meeting with interested instructors to create liaisons not only between programs and Schools, but also between SAIT and the Panajachel communities.
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