Student team helps future Torontonians find a home with award-winning app

Eva Boomsma, Alice Stubbs and David Figueroa have kept the streak alive by helping future Torontonians find a new place to call home.

The trio took third place in the ECCE App Challenge 2024 run by Esri Canada. Twenty-six student teams from across Canada – including four McMaster teams – competed in the annual competition.

McMaster teams have won top-three finishes for nine consecutive years – only the University of Waterloo is within striking distance with seven top three finishes.

“It’s pretty remarkable but not surprising that our students did it again this year,” says Pat DeLuca, a geographic information systems (GIS) specialist, lecturer and instructional assistant who’s mentored McMaster teams since the competition began.

Students have one week to build their apps using open data and ArcGIS – Esri’s web-based mapping software. Teams are then judged on their app’s source code, supporting documents and promotional video.

Eva, Alice and David built their award-winning Roads2Home app to help future Torontonians sort through the city’s 158 neighbourhoods. The students designed the app to be a user-friendly and comprehensive tool to explore, compare and understand different neighborhoods based on specific criteria and preferences. For the competition, the team drew on open data that included crime rates, housing affordability and proximity to elementary and secondary schools and public libraries.

Eva, a fourth-year Honours Life Sciences student who’ll graduate in June with a concurrent certificate in GIS, says her family could’ve used the app when they moved to Toronto from the Netherlands in 2010. “I liked the idea of creating something that could help other families find their new home.”

The team divvied up the work, with Eva collecting data and putting together the four-and-a-half minute promo and instructional video. It was a steep learning curve – “I went into the project with really limited video editing skills.”

Alice, a fourth-year Environment and Society student, focused on the app’s user interface and text. She also drew from her educational background in social geography and social inequalities in urban spaces to define why specific variables were chosen and measured.

David, who’ll be back in September for his fourth year as a Biodiversity and Environment Science student, turned open data into workable variables for the app and created the neighbourhood finder.

The competition is an extra-curricular project that ran near the end of the semester when Eva and Alice were also completing their fourth-year thesis projects. It was a whirlwind week of endless meetings, countless phone calls and not enough sleep that put their time and project management skills to the test. The team clocked upwards of 50 hours on the project.

But it was worth the time and effort, says Eva. The best part of the competition? “Seeing the finished product. It was so gratifying.”

For Alice, it was the chance to work on an “amazing team” and build comradery along with the app.

The team thinks of Pat as their honorary fourth member. He was “insanely helpful and supportive” says Alice. “He’s taught me almost everything I know about GIS and working with mapping software. We couldn’t have built this app without his encouragement and support.”

Pat says it’s important for students to compete in the app challenge for two reasons: they’re solving a real-world problem in a high-pressure situation and they come out of the challenge with a tangible product that sets them apart from other students and graduates in a competitive job market. “Few students compete in this challenge and even fewer students place in the top three.”

In 2014, the School of Earth, Environment & Society in the Faculty of Science was named one of the first six Esri Canada Centres of Excellence (ECCE) in Higher Education for GIS. There are now 11 universities and colleges that have been designated ECCE schools. McMaster was also the first Canadian university to earn the designation of ESRI Development Centre for Universities. Esri Canada is a privately held Canadian-owned company that provides enterprise GIS solutions.