³Ô¹ÏÍø

October 17, 2024

UVic software engineering professor Daniela Damian leads with empathy, and teaches her students to do the same. In the program she founded in 2022, students from middle school through undergraduates learn to develop technology for social good. The students learn to listen to their community clients and industry mentors and, Damian says, their collegiality and creativity becomes contagious within their teams.

This is important because, she explains, “technologies mirror the people who build them.”

During four-month co-op work terms within the past year, Inspire students built technologies that address fire, water and culture: things they heard first-hand are important to the communities they work with.

Bridging Roots in Tuk is an application that focuses on language and culture revitalization in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories. The need was identified by the members of the Mangilaluk School, a K-12 school with 260 students in the town of 900. In 2024, the app was co-designed by UVic Computer Science and Software Engineering students, and Mangilaluk students and teachers.

The Inspire team talked to the students in Tuk twice a week, says software engineering student Valeriya Savchenko in the . They followed each other on social media, talked about their lives—and only then did they start designing.

“And it wasn’t just with the students in Tuk,” Savchenko says. “It was also amongst ourselves in the team. Getting to know each other helped create psychological safety in our working environment, which allowed us to trust each other share big ideas.”

FireForce, a four-month project in 2023, focused on enhancing wildfire management in British Columbia and the Victoria Capital Region. This team of students developed software that can optimize fire and trespassing detection for the Sooke Lake Reservoir, which provides Greater Victoria’s drinking water.

“You have to consider, if you have clients, their perspective as well,” says Shyla Burns, a team member who collaborated with the CRD’s field experts and technical specialists to improve existing software and create new solutions for wildfire management and safety.

RainWise was the brainchild of four Shawnigan Lake School students after the school’s well ran dry during a drought in 2022. They proposed a rainwater harvesting system for drought-affected schools, entered their idea into the international Westmont Design Prize and later partnered with Inspire to turn their idea into something tangible. The UVic students then partnered with the Salt Spring Island Farmland Trust to design a sustainable and efficient water supply to help irrigate their community garden.

As the founder of Inspire, Damian was obviously a believer in this user-first mindset when she presented “” at TEDxVictoria in May 2024.

As she teaches students to do, she too had to consider her audience and then, on the day, speak from the heart.

Afterward, people who had been in the audience approached and told her that she had inspired them.
“It was,” Damian says, “like a dream of empowerment and community connection.”

-30-

Rachel Goldsworthy