4:07pm 02-24-2009

Ron Eglash

Are you familiar with Dr. Bell Watkins' teaching, research, or service to the community?

Yes I am familar with her work.

I am director of the NSF-sponsored project “Culturally Situated Design Tools,” which develops software for teaching math and computing to underrepresented students (see http://www.csdt.rpi.edu). Kera was interested in the service dimensions of the project and suggested we have students in her software engineering class collaborate with our software team. The project (spring 08) was a stunning success, thanks largely to Kera’s extraordinary management skills. Her class took one of the design tools we had previously created in flash (the Virtual Bead Loom: http://www.ccd.rpi.edu/eglash/csdt/na/loom/index.html), re-created it in java, and then extended its capabilities so that computer science elements could be taught. Our programmers are currently working to integrate that outcome into our suite, after which it will be tested on schools with minority populations in various states around the nation (particularly those schools with large Native American populations, since that is the cultural focus of the Virtual Bead Loom).

Kera’s collaboration did not stop there: in fall 08 she arranged for some additional computer science students to develop their own design tool. Their unique idea was a cooking simulation, which they reasoned would also be capable of cultural specificity since different ethnic groups are associated with “heritage foods.” Their curriculum was based on analogies between constructing computers and constructing meals.  They created both virtual and hardware versions, and plan to compare the effectiveness of both in the future.  

More recently her students started new projects for simulations of skateboarding and graffiti, also using the ethnomathematics approach but with a programmable interface. This is an exciting extension of our work and we are looking forward to seeing Kera present her results at the national meeting next year.

9:16pm 02-17-2009

Aiyana Brown

Are you familiar with Dr. Bell Watkins' teaching, research, or service to the community?

I am very familar with Dr. Bells work she is very involved with the community and university and she is very interested in the welfare of students. If you want to succeed she will help you reach your goals. I am very thankful for Dr. Bell and what she does for the school,  and I appreciate that she is very passionate about education. She is very interested in research and pair programming and teaching tools to help students to learn computer science.

She is involved in many organizations, and schools around the community. She actually enjoys teaching Java and gets excited when you have questions. She is also very helpful and willing to help you during office hours and she breaks down the questions or problem for you, she makes sure you understand vs. confusing you more.

5:13pm 02-17-2009

Chari Mackey

Are you familiar with Dr. Bell Watkins' teaching, research, or service to the community?

Yes

I am Vice President of the Society of Women Engineers and Senator for the National Society of Black Engineers and Dr. Bell Watkins is one of our advisors for both of these student organizations. She is very active and attends our meetings weekly to provide advise and support us in all of our activities. She is a wonderful and valuable asset and gives us the encouragement that we need to strive for the best. She is a great advocate in the education of technology for our youth and hosts many community events for children.  

3:57pm 02-17-2009

Teresa Dahlberg

Are you familiar with Dr. Bell Watkins' teaching, research, or service to the community?

Yes

It is my pleasure to acknowlege Dr. Kera Bell-Watkins Excellence in Service Leadership.  Herein I comment on Kera’s service to her profession through her work with the STARS Alliance.
I am an associate professor of computer science at UNC Charlotte and am Director of the UNC Charlotte Diversity in Information Technology Institute.  I am principal investigator and founding director of the Students & Technology in Academia, Research and Service (STARS) Alliance, a consortium of 20 universities and colleges and over 80 regional partners with a mission to increase the number of students in computing undergraduate and graduate programs.  We are funded by over $5 million in grants from the National Science Foundation Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) program.
We established the STARS Alliance in 2005 with 10 initial member institutions, each implementing our newly developed STARS Leadership Corps (“Corps”), which includes the following components:  
o Corps students attend a community building conference, the STARS Celebration that takes place annually in August, and involves three NSF BPC Alliances.
o Corps students participate in seminars focused on Technical Excellence, Leadership, Computing Community, Service and Civic Engagement.  
o Corps students receive a mentor and have the opportunity to serve as a mentor.
o Corps students serve as “computing ambassadors” by disseminating their research experiences to K-12 students through demonstrations and lab tours.
o Corps students present the results of their experiences at regional student conferences, the STARS Celebration, the Tapia Celebration of Diversity and Computing, or the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing.  
The Corps enables faculty and graduate student researchers to engage K-12 and undergraduate students in their research. However, the success of the corps at each school is contingent on the Academic Liaison – a faculty champion who takes leadership for implementing the corps at his or her institution.  Although the corps model is spelled out, the implementation requires much resourcefulness and persistence on the part of the Liaison.  The Liaison must develop external partnerships, recruit students, and figure out how to implement the corps within the current structure of his or her academic unit.  Furthermore, working on the corps is typically viewed as service work, and therefore must be done over and above the research and teaching needed to move a young professor towards tenure and promotion.
I met Kera in August, 2007, when she attended the STARS Celebration to explore the possibility of making Georgia Southern a member of the STARS Alliance.  I was so impressed with Kera, that we added Georgia Southern as a STARS member, with Kera serving as the Academic Liaison.  Kera has proven herself to be an outstanding leader.  I rank her in the top two of the 20 Liaisons with whom I’ve worked closely within the Alliance.  
Kera began implementing the Corps at Georgia Southern immediately following the 2007 Celebration.  She recruited students and developed outreach opportunities to engage pre-college students in computing activities.  She was an early adopter of a STARS demonstration project called Culturally Situated Design Tools, a method of using cultural artifacts to increase engagement in the computing discipline among minority students.  She was an early adopter of the STARS tiered, peer mentoring model, which provides “stair-step” mentor role models among high school, undergraduate, and graduate students.  In less than two years, she has become an important member of the STARS Alliance Steering Committee, providing programmatic oversight to Alliance activities.  Kera has excellent insight, which has helped shape our programs.  Lastly, Kera has contributed a great deal to the program evaluation efforts of the Alliance and has initiated and published two related papers to disseminate best practices.
Kera is a gifted computing researcher and leader who devotes her time and talent to broadening participation in computing.  She has already impacted many students and will surely become a force for BPC throughout her career.  It is my pleasure to work with her.

This free guestbook is brought to you by: 123Guestbook.com