Eckstein Middle School, in NE Seattle, had a variety of underutilized library and technology materials, extra space, and student interest in undertaking creative projects. This capstone identified the predominant problems facing student downtime and addressed them through the creation of a makerspace within the library. The project was completed in three phases: inventory of current available materials and wishlist, programming and procedures binder, and hosting a Maker Fest extravaganza. Eckstein’s makerspace is a place to inspire and engage students to pursue STEAM fields by providing an unstructured learning environment for student exploration.

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.

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.

Emergency youth shelters provide a safe, stable, temporary living alternative to youth who are dealing with family crisis. The staff at these shelters have the difficult task of balancing client care with meeting state and federal grant requirements. Our project saves the staff of these shelters time by tracking the most commonly needed client information and providing an online form database that can be updated when requirements change. With our tool, staff can keep an up-to-date list of the status of each case, allowing them to complete state and federal reporting while freeing up more time for client care.

In 1969, 89% of kids who lived within a mile of their school walked to school. Today, that number is around 35%. Parents’ concern over the lack of supervision and safety of their children has contributed to this steep decline. Karavan is a mobile application that facilitates group walks, allowing neighborhood children to safely walk to school together with a trusted chaperone. Parents can create group walks they can lead, or join their child to an existing walk. Walking improves children’s health, eases traffic congestion, and strengthens communities, and we hope to make walking to school the norm again!

Technology is revolutionizing the world however integrating technology into the education system has proven to be difficult. Students are more capable than ever and more inclined to use technology in their everyday life. Yet there is still a gap between education and technology. Peer.io is dedicated to bridging that gap. We have created a peer-to-peer platform for high school students to collaborate on for learning purposes. Features include discussion boards, tutoring sessions with other students and homework specific help. Our focus is to foster a community between students to promote the sharing of knowledge.

Our team aims to solve the problem that many parents are very busy at work, so that their children are not receiving enough guidance and companionship. We developed an Android educational game application that allows parents to have a safe mind to let their 6 to 8 years old kids play independently while providing children a fun and engaging game to play with. Parents can select learning objectives from a list of soft skills for their kids to learn and track kids’ playing progress. Children can learn the skills while building their own story and playing mini games.

The Ann P Wyckoff Teacher Resource Center (TRC) offers a library of resources geared towards helping educators engage their students with art and culture. With the upcoming remodel of their space, the TRC thought this would be a great opportunity to reorganize as well as reevaluate their current collections for diversity as well as authenticity. Through researching guidelines created by publishing companies and found in online resources and journal articles, we created our own general guideline for evaluating multicultural children’s literature and applied the worksheet to the Fiction African Children’s Literature collection.

Traditional disaster planning concerns what to do during an emergency. This document contains tools youth services personnel can use to prepare for what to do after. This toolkit is a customizable guide for youth services (serving ages 0 - 18) when their communities experience a time of crisis. Youth are especially vulnerable during this time, and library programs can help them process change and deal with emotions. Even better, most of the tools to deliver this service - like storytimes or tween programming - are already in place! From collection management to teen advisory boards - this toolkit covers it all!