iShowcase

As the culminating assignment for ESOC 480, students develop a mockup of a media profile or digital account of their choice. These accounts include Instagram profiles, TikTok accounts, YouTube channels, podcasts and the like.

For this project, students have created graphics, crafted content and provided a content calendar and/or communications plan outlining an engagement schedule for their chosen account. In other words, students have essentially developed all the materials required to “launch” a media profile or account.

At the iShowcase, video pitches created by ESOC 480 students will be playing back-to-back on a loop for passersby to experience.

In addition to these pitches, students also produced a summary of the goals of their chosen account, including benchmarks for measuring success and a two- to three-week content calendar/communication plan with all posts and communications for the period and goals for measuring success. 

At the iShowcase, students will be available to discuss their projects more extensively with those who stop by the ESOC 480 display. 

Group 1: UA Course Compass

The project aims to solve the challenges of disorganized course planning and career goal alignment for BS in Information Science students. Our software addresses the issue by creating a high-performance web-based application that uses data mining and web scraping to provide a tool for students to keep track of their 4-year course plan. The software provides a customizable course plan chart, extracts relevant information from the course catalog, and integrates a career-goal survey to deploy a machine-learning course recommendation algorithm.

Group 2: Online Gaming Wellbeing

Description: A presentation of our research on the video game Apex Legends, where we investigate how its community exhibits toxic behavior online, and then be able to present ideas to improve positive connections within the community and what Respawn Entertainment can do to help. This will be done with data visualizations of qualitative data based on online behavior with Apex Legends and online platforms that exhibit conversations and comments on the game.

Group 3: NSF Robotics Analysis 

Through data collection, as well as simple and LDA analyses, this project will use the last decade of Robotics grants at NSF in order to find trends in these programs and determine which subtopics have been utilized more and more each year to assist Robotics research. By determining which subtopics have been used incrementally more each year, it can be predicted which ones will become their own topics in the future. Thus, through this project, it will be possible to predict the subtopics which will be increasingly more popular in the future, as well as determine which subtopics are most beneficial to this specific kind of research. 

Group 4: Digital Literacy Research 

Our project is to analyze social media's impact on critical and digital literacy. The target of our study are Gen-Z users– a generation of digital natives most familiar with the internet/social media– and data from the time of the 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections. We work within the framework of politics because it is a prime example of how the spread of information can influence one's behavior, opinion, and action. Content shared during major elections tends to polarize public discourse where controversy and propaganda incite more engagement. We examine these events within the context of critical and digital literacy to reveal generational differences as to how users evaluate sources and what implications may arise as a result. 

Group 5: Analyzing Environmental Factors for Foodborne Illness and Recall Prediction 

Our research project is a statistical and machine learning analysis that investigates regional environmental factors such as weather changes and temperature patterns in relation to food-borne recalls and outbreaks that have been seen over the years. This study aims to investigate the relationship between the climate changes for major agricultural production regions in the United States and the likelihood of food-borne outbreaks such as Listeria sp and Salmonella. Through data analysis and cleaning using the last 20 years of recall data, we will encapsulate the data with the use of tools such as Python, R, SQL, and statistical methods, with visualizations through R and an interactive Tableau dashboard.

Group 6: Pocket Tutor 

Our project is a math educational tool that will take students handwritten math problems, scan them, and point out errors if the student makes a mistake. It will note, unlike other mathematical scanning services, provide the students the answer unless they got the question correct. The prototype can scan and provide feedback on single-variable algebra.

Group 7: Home by 10 

Home By 10 is a 2D, side-scrolling, story based game set during Halloween in 80’s suburbia with a group of teenagers trick-or-treating, with a deadline of getting home by 10pm but the encounter a evil that has corrupted the town but don’t know all the details and will find out though exploration.

Group 8: ReeldIn: Making Movies Matter

"ReeldIn: Making Movies Matter" is an innovative project that addresses the common challenge of choosing a movie from the massive and ever-expanding selection available today. It's designed to prevent indecisiveness and frustration among users, including choice overload, by focusing on quality over quantity. Through a web-based application, the project revolves around efficiently matching user preferences with a personally curated list of films, mainly through immediate and explicit user inputs, as well as hosting other features.

Group 9: FashionFolio 

Ever wasted mornings in 'I have nothing to wear' panic? Our project is an application that builds a virtual version of your closet. Effortlessly plan stylish outfits, cut dressing stress, and make your wardrobe work harder.

Group 10: BlendBud

BlendBud is a web-based application that provides wine suggestions based on previous ratings and preferences collected from a quiz. It utilizes simple language and detailed descriptions for those who are new to the world of wine. Additionally, users can form a community by sharing posts about wines they try and creating ‘blends’ with friends for suggestions catered to both of their tastes.

Group 11: Fight or Flake 

Crafted with a blend of academic prowess from diverse fields like sound design, game development, and human-computer interaction, our immersive rhythm game plunges you into a captivating world of snow and music. Experience the thrill of a digital journey like never before, where every beat and melody intertwine seamlessly to create an unforgettable gaming experience.

Group 12: Narrative Nest 

Struggling to wrangle your next masterpiece? We built a platform for writers of all levels, from seasoned novelists to aspiring wordsmiths. Imagine a collaborative space like GitHub, but specifically for writing! Develop your plot, track characters, and get feedback from a supportive community. Even tap into AI for inspiration and keep your story on track. Write solo or co-author with ease – it's all here. Unleash your creativity and bring your story to life!

Group 13: The Strong Survive 

A 3D adventure action exploration game with a mystery visual storytelling element that's set in an open world. The game's premise is about surviving as a creature on a mutated Earth of super-evolved monsters. The player and NPCs can steal attributes from each other by consuming one another, making the open world ever-changing and providing the player with a customizable arsenal to use and survive the harsh environment.

Group 14: Sustaining Wayville 

In this 2D top-down adventure game, Sustaining Wayville features environmental sustainability driven gameplay in the form of clearing trash-ridden monsters that plague the town of Wayville. It's up to the player to restore Wayville to its former glory and clean up the town by defeating the surrounding trash monsters that haunt Wayville’s ecosystem. The more monsters you defeat, the more areas that open up, and the cleaner the town of Wayville becomes. Unlock farming to grow crops that aid your quest or minigames to enjoy all that Wayville’s environment has to offer. Through combat and interacting with the local townspeople, the player will ultimately learn the significance of sustainability and how important it is in their own lives as well as Wayville’s livelihood.

Group 15: Life Lingo Frames

Life Lingo Frames is a pair of translator glasses and language learning software that gathers information from the user's surroundings in the form of video. This product then stores the data and displays the most frequently used words or phrases in a software that the user can interact with throughout the day. This product is needed to help immerse users in the language that they are learning when the typical “immersion” methods are not available to them. This system will help the user learn specific words and phrases they are using on a day-to-day basis. There is no use learning words you never use in real life, especially since repetition is one of the most effective ways to learn a language. This approach minimizes the amount of time spent studying by personalizing the experience to the user while encouraging repetition without actively learning the language.