There is a 3.6% unemployment rate and 263,000 unfilled jobs in the tech industry as of 2017. This, despite the fact that there were 116,00 tech graduates across colleges in America in 2016. Schools do an amazing job of giving us the foundational skills to work in tech but there is a gap between the classroom and the office. Our platform aims to bridge the void through challenges that emphasize best-practices and real-world interactions. In addition, every paying user will be putting money towards goodwill causes for those who may not be able to afford it.

Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada (CCSN) is a nonprofit social services provider that serves individuals and families in need in the Las Vegas area, including over 3,000 refugees each year. Although information for refugees is freely available online, this information is not beneficial to individuals with limited English language proficiency or digital literacy. In partnership with CCSN, we created a physical informational resource guide for refugees located in Southern Nevada, which can be updated and translated by resettlement organizations across the country.

Open Access (OA) publications allow for anyone to access research information free of charge. It is difficult for researchers to discover which OA publications exist, and the price to publish. We designed and implemented a data-driven web app and API enabling researchers to discover relevant and reputable OA publications to maximize publishing impact. We aggregated price information and journal impact data. Our goal is to provide the OA community with the tools they need to separate legitimate OA publications from unethical publishers. We believe transparency in the market will produce downward price pressure, further lowering economic barriers to publishing.

Roughly 50% of all produce in the United States is thrown away—some 60 million tons annually. Because this wastage is detrimental both to the environment and the economy, we created a way for people to manage their food better by building a mobile application that helps people waste less food. FoodSavr tracks the food in your kitchen, and suggests new recipes that encourage you to be more adventurous with your culinary experiences. It prioritizes food that is near expiration so you can create a tasty meal with it and avoid throwing it away.

Arriving at the University of Washington can be an overwhelming experience for most first year and transfer students. The amount of information about resources available is simultaneously overwhelming and difficult to navigate. This website collects many of the available free resources at the University of Washington Libraries, Seattle Public Library, and King County Library to allow students to easily find all of the incredible products and services their libraries provide. Making these resources more visible and user friendly to first year and transfer students enables them to excel in life, specifically as students, and more generally as human beings.

Many students don’t have full-time positions immediately following graduation. Our desire is to remove that divide. Frontier provides company sponsored projects that enable candidates to improve their resumes through project completion, as well as secure offers in their fields of interest. Companies will be able to follow up on brilliantly done submissions, and reach out to individuals they wish to hire. No other application has sought to solve this problem in this way. We are the first of our kind in the massive market of recruitment/staffing, and we plan on generating the bridge to connect brilliant candidates to brilliant companies.

Do you support global health causes? Do you have a passion for the outdoors? Mountain Safety Research Global Health (MSR GH), a nonprofit organization, wants to engage outdoor enthusiasts by allowing them to use their outdoor adventures to fundraise towards the organization’s global health initiatives. Our team has developed a dedicated fundraising platform to accomplish this. With our platform, outdoor enthusiasts can make a difference through their passion while MSR GH can use the proceeds to increase access to life necessities for people who are living on less than $5 a day.

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.