Otherworld Media intends to launch an online platform for school age children to engage multiple literacy skills while deepening comprehension and developing imagination. The final project will be a guide for parents and educators to encourage the self education of young learners. A growing body of research points to the need for young children to use safe search strategies. The goal is to give children, especially BIPOC, access to counter storytelling narratives, and regain control over their own education. Children will then grow into better educated and more well rounded adults with strong skills in self determination and self advocacy.

The Rainbow Connection is a capstone project aimed at improving the Follet Destiny Discover catalog interface for the LGBTQIA+ community of Ballard High School. Together with the sponsor, TuesD Chambers, MLIS candidates Henry Christopher, Jess Gray, and Leanne Pacheco work to improve the navigation of the library’s web pages, increasing ease of searching and information gathering. We survey the students and staff of BHS to gain stakeholder input. Then we create several digital collections to organize books by subject beyond what the current software provides. The result is an easy-to-navigate digital collection allowing users to find and access LGBTQIA+ materials.

Otherworld Media is a nonprofit media production organization that creates educational programs for children. It produced a radio show “A is for Adventure” with various literary themes and genres. Otherworld wanted library scavenger hunts to tie into the radio show to encourage children to use library resources. As the needs of today’s children changed due to the pandemic, the initial designs for scavenger hunts were adapted into an outline for an online game. A programmer is using the framework of games and resources we created to complete development of the game.

Adequate and equitable library spaces and services are not available to every student attending Seattle Public Schools. Stakeholders with different priorities have resulted in SPS libraries that are chronically understaffed and underfunded. Seattle’s citizens signaled strong library support through the recent allocation of $219 million to Seattle Public Library (SPL), the city’s primary library system. This Capstone advocates for a comprehensive public-public partnership between SPL and SPS libraries to scaffold the tremendous work of Seattle's school librarians while bringing all of the assets of SPL’s world-class library system into every one of the city’s public school communities.

Developing data literacy skills at a young age can dramatically improve workforce preparedness. However, not all middle schoolers are being taught data literacy. Through our user research, we learned that students are much more likely to learn these important skills if the data being used is directly related to their daily lives. Therefore, our team created Data Diary, a tool that helps build data visualizations that use data that is directly based on student-provided data. Data Diary teaches data literacy by gamifying the process of data collection and data analysis to increase student interest and participation.

The ability to read, analyze, and question data is becoming so crucial in today’s workforce and is considered a 21st century technical skill across all industries. However, our current education systems utilize traditional curriculum methods that fail to provide students with the comprehensive skills to interact with digital information. Data Viz Kids is a free interactive and interdisciplinary curriculum for middle school teachers to educate and bring data literacy into classrooms. Through the five modules, teachers will cover a wide range of data literacy skills in order to better prepare their students for higher education and the workforce.

The problem our project is trying to solve is that our Sponsor organization, a PreK-8 school, is unable to provide adequate library time to the students in grades PreK-3 due to a lack of resources. We created a diverse classroom library that rotates between the PreK-3 classrooms. Our goal is to support their literacy growth by increasing their access to high quality and appealing books. The books focus on diversity and inclusion acting as windows, mirrors, and doors. We also provided the school with resources that will assist them in continuing the work of adding diverse books into their library.

Save the planet in Minecraft! We use Minecraft, a game familiar to hundreds of millions, as a learning environment where students work together to explore and learn about their environmental impact. Teachers can use our collaborative experience to instruct their students digitally, augmenting their instruction with our simple, modular lesson plans, and interactive Minecraft Education experience. Students can explore our virtual village, Tree Town, and work together to save the village from climate change, all the while learning about environmental issues and developing critical thinking skills. Saving Tree Town will help kids develop the skills necessary to save the planet.

We worked with Reach Out and Read Colorado, a nonprofit that incorporates reading into pediatric care, to help improve literacy-rich waiting rooms in an urban and a rural clinic. First, we interviewed rockstar clinics about what makes a successful space. We then established community partnerships to provide books, art, and furniture. And we connected clinics with local librarians to promote library resources. Finally, we compiled our learnings into a best practices guide to be distributed nationally to ROR partner clinics. Although Covid-19 prevented us from delivering all materials, we managed to support the clinics and their efforts for early literacy.

Math. It’s tough. Especially for first-graders who struggle with staying motivated to learn in their own little world. HabiHero is a conservation-themed, math-based learning game with the goal of making math fun, customizable, and socially impactful. HabiHero uses gamification with a focus on saving endangered animals and their habitats. Each animal represents a topic in the math curricula that is based on the Common Core Standard. As users solve problems, they earn habi-badges and habi-coins that can be redeemed to customize your hero. Parents and teachers can also track progress and create lessons to have their little heroes solve.