This project was an attempt to develop a thesaurus of terms to describe the mechanics of various game-based media. This process primarily consisted of seeking feedback from various stakeholder groups on what kind of language they used to describe these media mechanics, and what developments they felt would be most useful. Ultimately, stakeholder needs could not be accommodated in a single document, necessitating the construction and testing of multiple taxonomy structures.

The University of Washington’s First-Year Interest Group (FIG) is a program designed to promote social cohesion and present academic options. Our team aimed to measure the impact of the program, using a study leveraging transcript data on over 60,000 students. We found FIGs provide an increased graduation rate of 5.9% to all students and up to 13.3% and 8.7% for underrepresented groups and Hispanic students, respectively. We also surveyed students, finding that friendship facilitation serves as the most beneficial aspect of the FIG program. Our research lays a groundwork surrounding the impacts of academic first-year programs at large universities.

Goya is a location driven social media application that lets users experience social network posts in person. Our project improves upon the social media experience by making it more real to a user. Posts on goya can be seen on a map, giving users a way to contextualize social media posts and relate to their community. Users are encouraged to visit posts in person by receiving points upon check-in; these points are akin to karma on reddit. The functionality of goya not only encourages community participation but also entices users to be more active and see the world around them.

Librarians surveyed in multiple districts in the Greater Seattle Area use a myriad of standards, lessons, and resources to ensure student readiness. Alignment, resource organization, and lesson sharing is important for equity across districts and ideally across the nation. Benchmark standards for library and information skills help ensure students’ lifelong success. We have created a tool within the LMS, Schoology, called Grounded In Standards Based Teaching. GIST houses an alignment guide of ISTE, AASL, and CCSS and grade band lessons. This tool addresses inequity in library programs while fostering cross-curricular collaboration across the state, focusing on Seattle Public Schools.

Finding parking in busy cities is stressful. Out of a sample of drivers in Seattle, 83% stated that they prefer public street parking to paid garages or lots, citing the significantly lower cost-per-hour and proximity to their intended destination. However, repeatedly circling an area for parking creates anxiety, increases traffic congestion, and pollutes the environment; consuming both time and gas. Gradient aims to streamline the street parking experience by leveraging civic parking data, crowdsourced user-input, and machine learning to predict the availability of nearby public street parking in real-time.

Finding the right graduate program that fits your requirements is an arduous task. Information is often scattered across different portals, inconsistent and confusing. Research showed that over 80% of graduate students encountered difficulties in choosing the right programs. GradScout is an innovative, user-friendly web application, which provides aspiring graduate students a platform to identify the programs that best meet their needs. Our intelligent algorithm recommends these programs based on areas of interest, budget, location and other criteria. With around 2 million graduate applications annually, GradScout aims to help applicants find their perfect graduate program and embark on a successful journey.

Many academic libraries face similar marketing challenges related to institutional repositories (IRs): how to motivate faculty and students to participate in a service they did not know they needed and with which they are unfamiliar? To incentivize undergraduate Capstone submissions to the IR, Pacific University Libraries developed a faculty-nominated Senior Project Award program. After years of low faculty participation in the Award, I helped address this marketing challenge by investigating why the program was not successful, researching common practices at other universities, and developing a detailed plan to revise and promote an enhanced incentive program at Pacific University.

National surveys show the majority of Americans have used an app to track anything related to their health. Unfortunately, almost half of those users have deleted those apps due to lost interest or time wasted entering data. Using Clarifai, an established machine vision company, HealthNuts has created a mobile friendly web application that allows people to simply take a picture of the foods they eat to record and display the nutrients they receive. This avoids the time and effort required for tracking this information by hand and creates a fun and unique experience to help people reach their nutritional goals.

Test Innovators is a firm that helps young students prepare for standardized tests like ISEE and SSAT and is looking at ways to develop a recommendation system that can be leveraged to improve their performance in tests. This project will entail identifying an exhaustive series of areas where a test-taking student is not performing well and recommending resources that will lead to the student’s improvement. The focus will be on developing an algorithm, which caters to this business requirement. The project aims to help the students improve on their weaker domains and take their first step towards a bright future.