THUNDER BAY — Two Confederation College programs have partnered to improve accessibility in skateboarding at the Cinema 5 Skatepark.
On Tuesday, the college’s Developmental Service Worker (DSW) Aerospace Manufacturing Engineering Technology (AMET) programs tested the strength of prototype adaptive devices that could hold a crutch onto a skateboard to support people with mobility challenges.
If successful, these students will learn to go into manufacturing and marketing with the devices.
“An assistive device is any piece of hardware that can assist a person in their day-to-day life or even their extracurricular activities,” said Chris Von Bargen, an AMET professor, who was approached in late 2024 by the DSW program and the skatepark to participate.
“It could be something like a cane. It could be an exoskeleton. It could be something to help you hold a pencil or open a jar, so any device, really, that will aid somebody in their mobility or their day-to-day life.”
He explained that AMET students are taught how to make parts to the standard where they could go into planes and be used for aerospace applications, but that’s not all.
“If you can put parts in a plane, you can put parts anywhere,” said Von Bargen.
“So really, our students are able to make just about anything when they graduate and so this is an excellent opportunity to showcase the alternate applications to the knowledge and skills that our students learn.”
He added that it was also a great opportunity to showcase a potential low-cost solution to an assistive device and for students to learn there’s more to their education than what they are specifically taught.
“It’s an opportunity, like I said, for them to see what they can do besides the technical skills we teach them in the program. It’s an opportunity to show them what they can really do when working with other groups of people,” said Von Bargen.
Even if these devices are not quite strong enough and fail, he added, the application, the process and having students work with a community program matters.
Vanessa Bowles, executive director of Cinema 5 Skatepark, thought it was an amazing initiative to have the two different programs come together.
“You don’t see this too often where programs are coming together to help each other, especially when we’re looking at community work,” said Bowles.
"So by them coming together, they’re able to support more youth (and) get more kids skateboarding, but also help with mobility issues and come up with different ideas."
With a huge waitlist, the park's adaptive skateboard programs usually take in around 14 youth at a time for a program, she explained. Many of these young people come from community agencies looking for alternatives to traditional activities, including George Jeffrey Children’s Centre and Autism Northwest.
"We're just expanding on what we can do in terms of adaptive equipment for youth," said Bowles.
She added it also gives the DSW program a really great opportunity to learn from the aerospace program, so if they’re ever struggling with adapting equipment or anything in the future, they have a program that they can go to that might have the answers for them or be able to manufacture for them.
“It’s a beautiful thing. When we start to think about accessibility, our students are able to recognize what the mobility needs are and what types of things need to be adapted, but they don’t necessarily have the skills to move forward and develop those things,” said Julie Zdep, the college's DSW program coordinator.
With 27 students from its community development course and across two years of the program, she explained that seven groups are running various accessibility projects at the skatepark to increase capacity within the community and support those with different mobility, intellectual and cognitive needs.
Some of these projects include improving the accessibility of skateboarding and the park itself, fundraising to improve accessibility, bringing in children from life skills classroom classes to learn how to skateboard and working to help teach a group of youth with autism to skateboard.
“Traditionally, when we think about skateboarding, we think about people who have full mobility,” said Zdep.
"We have to break down some of those barriers and start looking at how do we adapt equipment so that everybody has access to all different forms of recreational sport and activity."
