KidsTeam Rural took up the challenge of developing a Participatory Design (PD) infrastructure in a COVID-era, remote-only environment for two rural libraries. Working with a team of LIS students and librarians, KidsTeam Rural supported Colfax Library (Whitman County,WA) in transitioning an in-person Lego Mindstorms PD project to Zoom. For Chewelah Library (Stevens County, WA), we designed an asynchronous, analog-only design infrastructure to get kids’ co-designing their library space. The two projects enable youth in these communities to connect with librarians and contribute to their libraries in meaningful ways.

KraftKit was created with the intention of giving library workers, teachers, and other individuals that want another resource to find their next programming inspirations. It is also a platform where individuals can upload and share their programming ideas and connect with other users. Our goal is to become a free central resource for programming ideas so that it can enhance the services and experience in libraries, schools, or other recreational institutions.

This is a collaborative project between the Mount Vernon City Library and the Mount Vernon High School Mariachi Program to provide Folklórico (Mexican Folk) dance instruction and create a community literacy campaign. The central focus of this project is to engage with teens and Latinos who are currently underserved by the library and connect them to the library through outreach and innovative programming. This project promotes library resources to teens and within the school community and reinforces the school district's mission to be facilitators of lifelong learning by connecting students to the public library.

Our earth is at a critical stage where everyone of us should contribute to protect our land. In the U.S., 28% of greenhouse gas emissions are caused by transportation, and 40 million tons of food are wasted every year in the states. LEAF, a web application that offers three main features, would make real differences. Record, analyze, and off-sets your carbon emission. Every step you take to offset your carbon footprint would be resulting in a tree in real life. We hope to build a community for people to do something real to help the environment.

Improving and maintaining our mental wellbeing is a constant uphill battle that is often overlooked. After a difficult year, many are recognizing the importance of mental wellness and the effort needed to maintain it. Research shows that although many are becoming increasingly aware of its importance, few know where to start. For some, reflection can be an important first step. Leafy uses a gamified approach to mental wellness through reflection and journaling. Although everyone approaches their own wellbeing differently, we hope that Leafy will encourage users to be mindful of their mental wellness through journaling and intentional reflection.

Dating games are interactive electronic games that touch upon complex, real-world issues such as successfully navigating relationships, achieving healthy emotional intimacy, and exploring gender and sexual identities. However, conventional game tagging does not reflect the nuances of the genre or serve player information needs. To address this, we developed a taxonomy that is more inclusive of queer themes and can be adapted for both user-facing and back-end game cataloging purposes. We refined it with feedback from user interviews and industry professionals and applied it to create an online repository of dating games that serves as an information hub for players.

First-grade teachers at Glenridge Elementary School in Kent, Washington, were not given resources or curriculum to teach their social studies units. This led to stressful workloads for teachers and differing instruction for students. We surveyed teachers to determine their current practices and needs and researched the learning standards. We then found engaging, equitable, and standards-based open-access resources to create curriculum units encompassed into learning kits. These kits will help teachers plan their units and provide similar resources and talking points to make instruction equitable for students. Students will also see themselves in their learning.

Luther College expanded its majors and introduced two new interdisciplinary programs: Identity Studies and Global Health. The collections used to support these courses needed to be reviewed and appropriately developed to meet the needs of future users. Both have an emphasis on diversity and equity, and the collection also needed to reflect these values. Our project served to develop the collection in four key ways: analyzing the existing collection and presenting a report to the Luther library team, creating a list of recommended titles to purchase, creating research guides, and creating collection development guidelines and recommendations for subject liaisons.

Students and parents had to make challenging decisions regarding education during the COVID-19 pandemic. School districts across the US implemented varied school operation plans and the federal government did not create a centralized source for operational statuses at the national level. Data at the state level differs greatly in availability, verbiage, and format. This project aggregates and tracks district-level school operational statuses state-by-state, as well as school-related COVID-19 cases. It accounts for 6,800 out of 10,000 US school districts across 33 states. With this data, K-12 parents and children have a tool to make informed decisions regarding education and health.

Financial institutions have long been looking for quantitative methods to analyze tens of thousands of jargon-filled documents generated in the highly dynamic market. Thus, MarketOwl is the solution that can collect and assimilate these text data into measurable indicators. Through analyzing SEC filings and earnings call transcripts with its NLP engine, MarketOwl provides insights such as sentiment and credibility trends and transforms them into curated dashboards. MarketOwl empowers portfolio managers to make faster and better decisions with integrated and trustworthy company information and make more profits for their company and clients.