iSchool Capstone

2014

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Seattle Theatre During World War I: A Digital Exhibition of Seattle Theatre History

The Early Seattle Theatre History Project (ESTHP) is a digital history project launching its website later this year. The website’s mission is to help enrich the research of scholars, students, and subject enthusiasts. The ESTHP team hopes to do this by supplying the researcher with access to a plethora of primary resources. However, while the team began to familiarize themselves with the materials, the necessity of contextualizing some aspects of the theatre and theatre history arose. For my project I created a prototype digital exhibit for ESTHP focused on Seattle theatre during World War I. The digital exhibits contain essays and digital objects that focus on explaining certain themes brought up by the collection materials. The exhibits hope to illuminate subjects that might be missed by viewing the collection materials on their own. When the website launches other exhibits will be available to help guide researchers in understanding the collection.
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SeeYourChart Tutorial Project

Many patients may find it difficult to navigate the overwhelming amount of information they face following a disease diagnosis. SeeYourChart provides users one-stop, electronic access to their health information, but a lack of experience online can prevent users from benefiting from the site’s resources. The SeeYourChart Tutorial Project offers video instruction on site navigation to help address confusion, alleviate frustration, and improve users’ abilities to access important health information. Each tutorial is designed with consideration for the cognitive, physical, and learning style needs of SeeYourChart users. The resources are there, and every user should have the opportunity to learn about them.
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SharePoint Accreditation Site

Many colleges and academic programs undergo recurring accreditation. In this process, documents and information about the college or program must be collected from all of the units within the college, collocated, and shared with the accreditation committee in a timely manner. This presents several challenges. Many of the documents involved contain confidential material. In addition, collecting the documentation can be very time-consuming in a large college. Third, collocating documents in a place where many staff people have access can involve the risk of accidental deletions or faulty editing. My project involved building a SharePoint site to facilitate the AACSB accreditation process for the College of Business at University of Wyoming. SharePoint is an ideal tool for accreditation because it is secure, provides version control for recovery of lost or damaged items, and offers robust permissions control. For these reasons, this project has a broad application to other accredited institutions.
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Shelf

Most people have extra items, such as textbooks and video games, sitting on their shelves. They may only use them occasionally, but their friends and family could benefit from them. Collaborative consumption - sharing items among groups instead of buying them individually - empowers people to save money and reduce their ecological footprint. While several solutions exist for collaborative consumption, none combine an intuitive interface with a network of trusted friends and family. We are introducing Shelf, a Web application that facilitates the borrowing and lending of physical items amongst peers. Shelf integrates with social circles to leverage existing trust relationships while encouraging viral spread. We have also made security and accountability a primary concern, rewarding users who safely return items and penalizing those who do not. Our user-oriented approach incorporates extensive research and thorough planning to create a useful and relevant solution. Check us out at dontbeshelfish.com.
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SmartAdventure

SmartAdventure addresses the problem that students’ test scores in the United States has remained stagnate for the past decade. This has been attributed partially to the fact the students aren’t learning subject foundations in primary school where the classrooms are too large and students don’t receive individualized attention. To address this issue we designed and built a prototype for an educational web application called SmartAdventure. SmartAdventure provides students with immediate feedback, tracks progress for individualized learning, and shows students and teachers where a student is excelling and needs improvement. SmartAdventure is a solution that allows students to learn at their own pace and allows teachers to easily identify students that require additional attention.
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SmartChart: Charting Application for Preschool Teachers

First Steps Preschool Infant Teachers are responsible for recording accurate and detailed information on paper charts while caring for infants in the Infant Room. One to two teachers care for five to eight infants from 7am until 6pm, Monday through Friday. Teachers dedicate over 60 minutes a day to recording and sharing with parents the activities and behaviors involving the daily health, habits, and significant developments of the infants. This all must be done while performing a variety of tasks such as feeding, changing, rocking, coddling, playing with, and/or holding one or more infants. A charting application on a mobile device in the Infant Room will allow the teachers more time to care for the infants rather than having to additionally juggle clipboards, paper, pens and other objects. Time needed for charting and verbal reports will be reduced while time available for caring for the infants will be increased.
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Speech.is: Extending Namecoin Anti-Censorship Technology to the Web

Online free-speech is under attack: over 50% of internet users live in countries with medium to high levels of censorship. Legislation like SOPA, PIPA, and the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty are all attempts at forcing internet blacklists on the free world. Speech.is provides interoperability between a special censorship resistant top-level-domain name, ‘.bit’, and the rest of the web. A ‘.bit’ domain name is a lot like a ‘.com’ or ‘.net’ domain name except that no government can take control of it. Speech.is makes it possible for anyone to surf websites on the censorship resistant Namecoin domain-name-system using their regular web browser, without any add-ons and without changing any system settings. Speech.is provides a safe haven for internet users on the web, where governments cannot seize domain names nor selectively censor websites. Speech.is effectively neuters the censorship provisions of the TPP and represents a major blow against censorship and big step forward for the web.
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SYM Reporting System for Helping Homeless Youth

The National Runaway Switchboard estimates that on any given night there are approximately 1.3 million homeless youth living unsupervised on the streets, in abandoned buildings, with friends or with strangers. At the same time, general statistical software is usually unaffordable for non-profit youth caring organizations. Finally, lack of person-focused statistics makes it hard to provide person-focused caring. The SYM reporting system was developed to help Street Youth Ministries by providing an overall view of activities, generating impact reports to sponsors, and detecting the young people who need immediate care, thus hugely improving the efficiency of resource allocation.
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TEDxRainier Companion App

The power of ideas unleashes when ideas spread. TEDxRainier is devoted to making a difference by gathering thinkers and spreading ideas. Active communities built around ideas will be a great addition to the existing annual event, to help ideas spread further. However, it is hard to maintain such communities with limited resources. This companion app we designed helps facilitate community building by leveraging the power of Twitter hashtags. We are focusing on solving the problem and making this app simple and easy to use.
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Testing and Immunization Practices Recommendation Application

The International Medicine Clinic at Harborview offers primary care to adult refugees and immigrants. Patients typically originate from Southeast Asia or East Africa, and many have complex medical conditions, are accustomed to non-Western medicine, and do not have complete health records. In order to help community doctors to treat refugees and immigrants, the International Clinic developed a toolkit to provide tips on accessing patients’ medical information and suggestions for treatment and health screening. Our project is to build an interactive web application with more thorough references and recommendations based on the toolkit.