Many people in the gaming industry are not aware of the symptoms and prevalence of mental illness. As a result, it often goes unnoticed or misappropriated. We believe that the gaming community will benefit from our platform through telling a story about mental illness. In our own experiences, we haven’t felt that the gaming industry has been an inclusive space. Our solution is to create a video game that tells a story about mental health through the lens of games and gaming. Users will be informed about important aspects of mental illness while enjoying an entertaining game.

How to teach data science effectively is still largely unknown, as is the experience of educators in this field. Many data science instructors transition from practitioner roles, and understanding their experience during this transition may inform us of ways to support these individuals. To study this, I transitioned from data science practitioner to educator and tracked the experience with journal entries. The study found that I encountered many challenges, mainly surrounding issues of teaching in a higher education context, caring about others opinions, and difficulty distinguishing identity between peer, TA, or instructor.

Cataloging streaming audio resources ensures streaming audio content is accessible and discoverable. However, many records do not adhere to standardized file formats. These errors cause increased workload and lost work hours. Enhancement of streaming audio metadata can be addressed in multiple ways: facilitating metadata conversations with content providers, original cataloging of streaming audio resources, and creating recommended best practices. This project focuses primarily on creating best practices and demonstrating those practices in original cataloging records. Through establishing best practices for creating streaming audio metadata, this project takes an important first step toward improving accessibility and discoverability of streaming audio resources.

16 crimes per day occur in Seattle. This is 115% higher than the national average. Working directly with The University of Washington’s Police Department, our mission is to increase the sense of safety on campus by keeping University Residents informed of nearby crimes in real-time. The core of our project is to amplify the accessibility of UWPD’s crime data for technical users through a public API, and for non-technical users through a public visualization dashboard. Through these tools, residents will be empowered to make better decisions surround their safety.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are cyber-physical systems that allow operators to monitor and control complex industrial processes, such as those found in energy, manufacturing, and other critical infrastructures. ICS operators face numerous challenges, especially information overload, reliance on disparate information sources, and a lack of aggregated, consumable, and intuitive ways to gain insights on ICS vulnerabilities and risks to protect their assets. By leveraging thoughtful user-centric design, we worked with FireEye to create and organize a structure for meaningful relationships between vulnerabilities and assets, designing a user-friendly system to display information that is both easy to understand and actionable.

To learn about the potentials of Virtual Reality, we designed a curriculum for teenagers, called VR Camp, taught over spring break at Snoqualmie Public Library. It was divided into three modules; each exposed students to different ways of interacting with VR and paired those experiences with participatory design activities. This VR program served as a pilot for a larger research project at the UW. Funded by a grant from the IMLS, this project brought VR to incarcerated youth in Snoqualmie Valley. Findings from VR Camp and the larger project will help inform the creation of a library practitioner toolkit.

The Mt. Angel Public Library does not currently conduct outreach in the wider community and their outreach efforts in the past have been limited in scope and impact. Our outreach plan contains a detailed strategy and two different budget proposals for expansion of Mt. Angel’s outreach efforts. The community will benefit from increased contact with the library’s services, and the library will benefit from increased use and impact in the community. Our outreach plan is designed to ensure that everyone in Mt. Angel is aware of and uses all the library services available to them.

The goal of this capstone was to revise the Drama and Theater taxonomy in Resources for College Libraries to make it more equitable in its classification and consistent in its structure. Revisions were informed by targeted readings about controlled vocabulary development, and domain research from The Essential Theater by Oscar G. Brockett. I was able to update the taxonomy to make it more equitable and consistent by using these resources and feedback from my sponsor. These changes will make the taxonomy easier to keep current going forward and easier for librarians to use for collection development.

For people with visual impairments, navigating the Seattle public transportation system without assistance is challenging due to the reliance on visual cues. With the help of Where-able, people with visual impairments are able to input their bus number and route so that the wearable vibrates when the bus is approaching, signaling the arrival of the bus. Our app and hardware enables users with visual impairments to be better supported when getting around the city of Seattle by eliminating one of the struggles of the public transportation system.

“William S. Boyd School of Law: The First 20 Years” is an online archives and physical exhibit which invites members of the Nevada legal community to reflect upon the growth of our state’s only law school since its founding in 1998. The Wiener-Rogers Law Library at the UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law sponsored this project. From the sponsor’s existing holdings, over 200 artifacts were selected for digitization. Roughly half of the digitized artifacts were added to a newly created online collection. Certain other artifacts were selected for physical exhibition, on display in the sponsor library through December 2019.