June 23, 2025

Imagine being assigned to a project with two other people you don’t know, one of whom lives halfway around the world.

Imagine being told that the three of you must develop an idea from scratch, one that solves a specific problem and proves itself to be both technologically and commercially viable.

Imagine having to pull this off within a few weeks while juggling regular class work and other responsibilities.

That’s exactly the situation students found themselves in during the Seneca/Amity Design Jam Powered by Microsoft Copilot Suite, a collaboration between Seneca Polytechnic and Amity University Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, with support from Microsoft.

For the inaugural Design Jam, students were assigned to teams and tasked with using Microsoft Copilot to develop an assistive technology.

“It was so exciting because we were not only working with students with different academic backgrounds, but also different cultural backgrounds.” said Krishma Chhagani, a student in Seneca’s Honours Bachelor of Commerce – Business Management degree program who took part in the event.

Participants were assigned to teams in such a way that every group had representation from both Seneca and Amity. Care was also taken to ensure that students from different fields of study were teamed up. In this case, Ms. Chhagani's teammates were Riya Shah, a student in Seneca’s Honours Bachelor of Commerce – Business Technology Management degree program and Aqsa Khan, who is studying computer science and engineering at Amity.

The team quickly figured out how to harness their diverse areas of expertise and tackle the Design Jam challenge.

The design they landed on was a browser plugin that helps make internet searches simpler, more personalized and less stressful for people who might ordinarily have difficulty with that experience.

“If the user is scrolling excessively or switching between pages excessively, our plugin detects these patterns and opens a pop-up window that asks ‘Are you looking for something? Can I help you with something?’” said Ms. Chhagani.

The teams had just a few weeks to determine what they would design, attend learning and mentoring sessions, put together their pitch and – if time permitted – create a prototype to further impress the judges. the Chhagani-Shah-Khan team clearly succeeded in these tasks, as they were named co-winners of the competition.

Also finishing in first place were Harkit Singh Chhabra, a student in Seneca’s Computer Programming and Analysis diploma program, and Vaseeq Khan, who is studying aerospace engineering at Amity. They leveraged deep learning, live imagery, neural network and text-to-speech technologies to create a program that translates American Sign Language messages in real-time into text that can be used for Microsoft Teams conversations.

Although the competition is now finished, the winning students will continue to benefit from their Design Jam experience. Later this year, the winning students from Seneca will fly to Dubai and the winning students from Amity will travel to Toronto. During these reciprocal visits, the students will receive additional training and professional development as they continue to work on their ventures.