In Spring of 2020, UW Libraries closed its doors leaving students to adapt to new ways of studying and researching in an entirely virtual environment. When the Libraries re-opened, student use failed to return to pre-pandemic numbers. To investigate, we interviewed UW Fine Arts students to discover if their values aligned with their branch library’s. Unsurprisingly, after years of virtual college experiences, student values now reflect a strong need for socialization and community building from their libraries. It is our hope that these findings will allow UW Libraries to re-align their service model to meet these previously unvoiced needs.

The 7 Forms of Respect quiz and assessment tool from CuriosityBased assists teams in building respectful relationships in the workplace. Continuing a previous Capstone engagement, our team developed a more streamlined solution built upon Google Suite and Google Apps Script. The project scope included creating a quiz interface that is intuitive, a more functional test result PDF page, and an eCommerce integration enabling users to purchase a premium assessment if desired. As a Women and minority-owned enterprise, CuriosityBased can leverage the revamped solution to reach an even greater number of stakeholders while reducing manual intervention for the in-house team.

Isolated seniors and disconnected teens - our application aims to bridge the inter-generational gap between youth and elders in the community. As service hours are required for Seattle Public Schools students, our platform allows them to acquire these hours through connecting them to seniors in the community who may need help. Seniors request help for small household tasks by posting on the platform, where students can then pick up the ones which match their schedules. The more time young and old people spend together, the more both parties benefit.

Pregnant people are overwhelmed by the vast plethora of information about birth and postpartum while simultaneously feeling lost and without agency. Using NNLM, PubMed, and MedlinePlus, we conducted research on their information-seeking behavior and created a library toolkit for public librarians to create materials for their patrons about maternal health. Our resulting toolkit includes handouts, social media tools, inclusive vocabulary, and bookmarks that are ready-to-go or customizable. Our project makes a difference because the published toolkit on NNLM’s website will increase health literacy and empower library patrons in local communities to be an informed participant in their health decisions.

Utilization of library resources is instrumental towards academic success; however, library anxiety can inhibit student’s ability to access library’s resources. The present study investigates how book clubs influence library anxiety. Five librarians were interviewed about their experiences with book clubs. Patterns emerged indicating book clubs offering holistic student support, focusing on building relationships, and addressing different levels of anxiety saw decreases in library anxiety. Suggestions for best practices in designing and running book clubs to decrease library anxiety are provided. Reduction in library anxiety helps increase a student’s ability to use library resources and can thereby increase their academic success.

Microsoft's Mixed Reality GRC program currently leverages various GRC management solutions such as ticketing tools, dashboards, and automated workflows to meet the GRC obligations. However, as the volume of requests increases, the Mixed Reality GRC team seeks an integrated and centralized platform to reduce operational overhead, increase efficiency, and improve overall usability. This project creates a virtual chatbot to provide main features like submitting a request, updating a request, and troubleshooting questions. This new functionality will allow all Microsoft employees to communicate and resolve issues seamlessly with the Mixed Reality GRC program.

Women of color students are a marginalized identity within the field of STEM spaces. In understanding how we can better support WOC students in educational settings, we can turn to teaching assistants. Teaching assistants play a direct, vital role in providing encouragement and empowerment to help students strive in pursuing the tech field. CONNECTA’s mission is to educate and engage students and teaching assistants to better equip them with tools to work with students with diverse backgrounds in creating comfortable and engaging learning spaces.

Drawing upon several philosophical theories and experiential pedagogies, I've designed a gamified learning device to assist learners in developing their research skills so that they will be better equipped with the literacies to navigate our complicated mediasphere in their personal, academic and professional lives. This device’s collection echoes the random assortments found in the historical variations of curiosity cabinets. Learners will manually inspect and speculate about the cabinet’s mysterious and unusual objects and then will utilize library resources to investigate their actual origins or functions. This learning program is repeatable and adaptable for many types of learners.

Fiction subject tagging in libraries is largely ineffectual for a variety of reasons—e.g. a lack of robust, open-access vocabularies, the difficulty and time commitment of assessing the contents of fiction, and unsuitable software. In partnership with Fiction Filters: Taxonomy for Adult Fiction, who created our core vocabulary of tags, we created a website in which users tag previously read books in subject areas such as character traits and tropes, using their own or pre-existing tags. This gives power to readers to highlight what they find most important and appealing about books, browse by personal interests, and filter out unwanted content.

The Flipgrid team at Microsoft believes that a healthy online learning platform is the combination of the sense of safety and the level of engagement from its users on the site. Using PowerBI as a vessel to track Flipgrid’s platform content and user activity, our mission was to help the Flipgrid team refine how they measure the health of their platform. The insights generated from this report will support Flipgrid’s effort to create platform policies and feature enhancements that make the online platform a safe environment for all users as well as a source of good connections and healthy experiences.