An application to map out alternatives to the stairs in Parisian metro stations: it was thanks to this socially responsible and committed project that the creators of the Slicky application won over the Modis jury. The ESILV team won the “Coup de Coeur” prize for its initiative addressing people with mobility issues or who are carrying a lot of luggage with them.
Each year, the Coup2Boost competition organised by Modis France, a consulting firm in engineering, digital services and life sciences, brings together the best student initiatives in all areas: entrepreneurship, sport, digital, solidarity/disability, art and culture, sustainability, international, innovation…
The best entries selected by the four panels of juries members from partner companies and associations: Capgemini, Sogeprom, STEF and Tremplin Handicap share a grant of more than €20,000, which enables them to turn their project into reality and give life to the ideas that are close to their hearts.
Slicky, a project inspired by the everyday reality of disabled people
Sarah Ménard, Bianca Bieder, Florian Meynet, Salomé Billy, Killian Thebaud, 4th-year students at ESILV, drew from the reality of disabled people and their own experience to develop Slicky. This application proposes a solution to the absence of signage in Paris public transport.
“At the beginning of the school year, it wasn’t easy to find a flat in Paris, and I had to make many trips by metro with a big suitcase. I came to realise that there was a significant lack of information about the availability and exact location of the alternatives to stairs in the metro.” (Sarah Ménard, ESILV student, class of 2022)
Sarah and her friends realised what a struggle a journey in the metro could represent for wheelchair users, but also elderly people, people on crutches, parents with their prams or even people with a lot of luggage.
It is with the help of the association “Comme les autres” that the five student engineers, who were encouraged by ESILV to be entrepreneurial, have been able to make their idea a reality. They propose online and offline solutions that help people get their bearings when getting out of the metro while avoiding obstacles (stairs, slopes, broken down lifts).
“Our project can be summed up as a participative application named Slicky, which proposes a route adapted to the user’s specific needs. The alternatives to the obstacles are precisely outlined, can be visualised on maps and are accompanied by photos or videos. Users can contribute to updating and enriching the database of these key locations by submitting new photos and videos.”
Contributors can also point out technical malfunctions in lifts, escalators or the on-going works to alert other users so that they can change their route and speed up the process of putting these alternatives back into service.
ESILV students have been nominated as finalists and won Modis’ ”Coup2boost” prize. The partner company appreciated the values of accessibility for all and mutual aid advocated by the Slicky project.
Project-based pedagogy is at the heart of learning at ESILV, the generalist engineering school of the Pôle Léonard de Vinci. The “learning by doing” method allows students to test skills whose practical applications they can quickly perceive.
ESILV’s future graduates implement various projects throughout the engineering curriculum: PIX 1 and 2 (imagination and exploration project during the first and second years of integrated preparatory courses), PING (generalist digital engineering project, during the first year of the engineering cycle), PI24 and 5 (industrial innovation project during the 4th and 5th years of the engineering cycle).
This post was last modified on 15 September 2020 4:12 pm