Pawdy is a free, secure, and accessible pet sitting website designed for UW students. As our furry friends have become a crucial part of our life, the need for pet sitting has grown exponentially. Many students have to sacrifice personal life for their pets due to the high cost of pet sitting. With Pawdy, students can find other UW students to sit their pets for free. Students can request pet sitting and interested student pet owners can contact them to make arrangements. Pawdy provides convenience for pet sitting, forms a close-knit community around the campus, and develops relationships around their interests in pets.

Gender minorities entering the technology field experience imposter phenomenon (IP) at a disproportionate rate as compared to their male counterparts. Phenomenality aims to mitigate the effects of perceived inadequacy by encouraging users to reflect on and celebrate their daily accomplishments in a journal-like manner. Through consistent, affirmative self-talk, a Likert scale quiz, and personalized IP alleviation strategies, Phenomenality provides gender minorities with the resources to optimize their potential, boost their confidence, and ultimately flourish in their professional environments.

Plurality is a safe and welcoming platform providing a space for political dialogue to bridge partisan divides. Based in research demonstrating the power of storytelling to elicit empathy, Plurality allows users to share and learn about diverse perspectives through first hand accounts. Plurality encourages users to see people as more than their political party and seeks to ameliorate the current environment of hyper-partisanship.

PNW Native Collection continues the Native Voices 2021 Capstone project. Our project expanded upon the map and website designed by Adylenne Ascencio and Rachel Kresl by adding more resources. The goal was to collect both books and films written and created by Indigenous creators of the Pacific Northwest into a database that can be shared with both Native and non-Native communities. We added 46 new items, updated the name of the project, and thought of organizations we could share this resource with. This resource will help others easily find resources that celebrate Indigenous creators, and it also promotes land acknowledgment.

To establish trust between the public and the Seattle Police Department (SPD), it is imperative that there is accountability and transparency with SPD’s processes and procedures. In this project, we build a machine learning model that can be used to predict and audit adequate Use of Force (UOF) by officers based on the nature of a dispatch event. The model developed through this project can serve as a tool for the SPD to identify and understand deviance from regular trends to guide police training and will also help to identify whether UOF is being accurately reported.

Eurocentric beauty standards are highly pervasive throughout social media, and non-white features are often not represented or seen as beautiful. This can lead to feelings of low-self esteem, non-inclusiveness, and toxicity around physical appearance. Empowering users through variation, not standardization, Jasmine is a mobile-browser app that aims to showcase beauty through diversity. Jasmine pushes users’ ideas of beauty beyond just a Eurocentric scope by allowing women in our communities to upload photos of their unedited and untouched features.

The QHS Library Literacy Toolbox helped increase students’ use and access to the QHS Library while improving students’ literacy development. Teachers and students worked together with the school library to create and sustain three interconnected tiers of support, including reintroducing independent reading schoolwide; reestablishing a book club, Jack of Clubs, focused on diverse and #OwnVoices books with social justice/action themes; and creating the first secondary writing center in Washington State, QHS Writing Center, where peer tutors worked with their peers to support them in becoming reflective writers, learners, and thinkers. This library programming can inspire other high school libraries nationwide.

Both transportation and car production generate a large share of greenhouse gas emissions, leading to negative environmental impacts. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a shortage of vehicles for rentals, reducing college students’ access to vehicles when they need them. QuickTrip aims to solve this problem through a marketplace model. QuickTrip is a mobile car-sharing platform that allows students at the University of Washington in need of a car to rent a car from their friends, making the benefits of point-to-point transportation accessible to a larger audience.

As a part of Read-a-Rama’s efforts to grow, our team created new materials and refined existing resources to lower barriers for staff development and expansion–which has been an obstacle for the organization. We created a facilitator guide, a curriculum template, and instructional videos for camp songs. Our materials enable new facilitators to be more independent of Read-a-Rama’s co-founder, Dr. Michelle Martin, expanding Read-a-Rama’s project capacity. Read-a-Rama encourages a lifelong love for reading through books, stories, songs and movement. As new facilitators are trained to carry out Read-a-Rama programming, more camps and programs can reach new campers worldwide.

As part of their degree requirements, Music Performance majors perform solo recitals. Voice majors have often relied on repertoire recommendations from their voice professors, or have drawn from a narrow range of well-known composers. This project seeks to connect singers to more unique song repertoire via techniques inspired by the “read alike” and Nancy Pearl’s “four doorways.” The “read alike” concept was adapted and placed within a repertoire selection framework as a set of search strategies. The framework allows students to find music that speaks to them, is varied and diverse, and promotes a more research-minded approach to performing.