Dr. Kinnis Gosha was recently selected as the recipient of the Hortenius I. Chenault Endowed Professorship. He will hold the term appointed Chenault Endowed Professor in Mathematics and Sciences. The purpose of this professorship is to provide salary support that will allow Dr. Gosha to enhance his research at Morehouse College. Dr. Gosha’s primary research interests include expanding computer science education, broadening participation in computing, green computing, and culturally relevant computing. Undergraduate researchers in his lab, the Culturally Relevant Computing Lab, investigate research problems centered on creating innovative computing technologies to solve cultural problems and issues. Applications of his research include robotics, avatars, and video games.
Author: shanikajordan
Dr. Kinnis Gosha Director of the Culturally Relevant Computing lab spoke at the University of Georgia Tech’s Graphic Visualization Usability (GVU) Center’s Brown Bag Seminar. The discussion was on the topic of ways to broaden participation in computing. Dr. Gosha introduced the concept of how conversational agents such as Siri and Alexa are already doing this in everyday households. However, these agents also provide a unique opportunity to provide mentoring and advice to individuals in ways that cannot be accomplished by traditional human-to-human interactions. His presentation provided details on multiple projects (in progress and completed) that leverage various types of conversational agents to address issues in the area of broadening participation in computing.
Morehouse College and Alabama A&M University are collaborating on a research project to explore the use of chatbots to provide career mentoring for undergraduate computer science majors who are considering pursuing a graduate degree in computing (Award #1831964). The study will include participating students from ten different Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
African Americans with terminal degrees in computer science are scarce. However, HBCUs have a strong history of producing African American students who go on to get advanced degrees in computing. Research in this field will enable effective mentors in computer science to scale their best practices to a more significant percentage of undergraduate students at HBCUs.
The project will also fund the development of formal collaboration between Morehouse College and Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). This groundbreaking program will allow the Principal Investigator, Dr. Kinnis Gosha, to serve as the thesis advisor for Masters students at Georgia Tech while trained as researchers at Morehouse College.
This project will investigate the barriers faced by African American students when deciding on pursuing advanced degrees in computing as well as how intelligent virtual mentors affect their decision. It will examine what the most effective way for an embodied conversational agent to interact with these specific group of students.
The findings from this study will be used to expand to other underrepresented groups to provide career mentoring for an assortment of science careers. Additionally, the conclusions of this research will help to build the research capacity at two HBCUs, Morehouse College and Alabama A&M University.
Morehouse College Computer Science Department won a $299,621 National Science Foundation grant (Award #1837541) to prepare in-service high school teachers for teaching the Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) course, the Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC), with support from undergraduate computer science (CS) majors. The work leverages long-standing relationships between members of the Atlanta University Center Consortium (Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Clark Atlanta University), and the Atlanta Public Schools (APS).
APS predominantly serves and employs African American and other minority students and teachers. Likewise, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) of the Atlanta University Center primarily serve minority undergraduate students. Through this unique model, minority in-service, high school teachers will receive BJC professional development and support from minority undergraduate CS students in teaching their majority-minority AP CSP classes. The undergraduates will serve both as teaching assistants for the new CS teachers and as role models for the students. In turn, minority APS students will receive rigorous CS instruction contextualized within their culture.
This project will study the effects of in-person undergraduate teaching assistants during PD for and implementation of the BJC curriculum within minority populations. It will examine the outcomes of these teaching assistant and teacher relationships, exploring changes in teachers’ CS content knowledge, understanding of careers in computing, confidence in teaching CS, and success in recruiting and retaining students of color. Likewise, it will examine effects on the undergraduate student teaching assistants regarding the ability to provide instructional support, levels of civic engagement, CS content knowledge, and professional identity.
The Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) has identified research in broadening participation in STEM as one of its priorities and is committed to funding innovative models and research to enhance the understanding of the barriers that hinder and factors that improve and increase our ability to broaden participation in STEM.
The project at Morehouse College has been designed to initiate the implementation of essential research that will set the foundation for the development of the theoretical model for resilient science identity formation. The project in collaboration with Virginia State University and several other other HBCU institutions is designed to strengthen education research capacity by implementing a comprehensive faculty development program.
The goal of the HBCU Identity Research Center for STEM (Award #1818458) is to establish the foundational tenets of the theoretical model for resilient science identity formation. The project will achieve this goal through:
- Research activities that will contribute to an increased knowledge base on science identity formation and other psychosocial constructs that promote the creation of a resilient identity and ultimately success and retention in STEM.
- Education activities that contribute to learning about the experiences and accomplishments of STEM education at HBCUs.
- Knowledge translation activities that will facilitate the development of an intellectual infrastructure to ensure mutually beneficial communication and collaboration between individuals to propagate ideas and discover new research opportunities in the science of broadening participation.
- Outreach activities to all stakeholders and the broader academic community to engage in project activities and to inform the higher education community.
The project will impact the research training and education of thousands of students, hundreds of faculty, and the academic community at large about the science of broadening participation in general and identity formation specifically.
Morehouse College was awarded a Targeted Infusion Project grant entitled: Creation of a for Credit Online scientific Literacy Pre-freshman Summer Bridge Program (Award #1818618) on April 16, 2018. This highly innovative project will create a new category of problem-based learning products designed to facilitate student understanding of the scientific research process by using a virtual laboratory to simulate a research experience. The program will begin May 15, 2018, and run through April 30, 2021. Anticipated outcomes from this virtual research experience include increasing students’ critical thinking skills, intrinsic motivation, self-management skills, utilitarian scientific literacy, and intent to persist in STEM careers.
The new category of problem-based learning products that will be created to infuse into the online Scientific Literacy course will occur by modifying an interdisciplinary Research Simulation Case Study (RSCS) entitled Brain-Eating Amoeba. The RSCS is a faculty-mentored experience that requires a student to solve a research case study by assuming the role of a research scientist. The RSCS Brain-Eating Amoeba will be facilitated by a virtual embodied conversational agent (ECA), instead of a live faculty mentor. This computer-generated character is created from the face of a real individual and demonstrates many of the same properties as human face-to-face conversation, including the ability to produce and respond to verbal and nonverbal communication. An embodied conversational agent-research simulation (ECA-RS) case study will be created by combining ECA technology with the comprehensive, interdisciplinary Brain-Eating Amoeba RSCS.
The Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) through Targeted Infusion Projects supports the development, implementation, and study of evidence-based, innovative models and approaches for improving the preparation and success of HBCU undergraduate students so that they may pursue STEM graduate programs and careers. The addition of the Brain-Eating Amoeba ECA-RS to the online course will enable its transition to a for-credit course that will be offered at no cost during the Pre-Freshmen Scientific Literacy Summer Bridge Program as an incentive for pre-freshmen to participate. The successful implementation of this program at Morehouse College will increase retention and ultimately graduation rates of African American students graduating with STEM degrees and entering into the national STEM workforce.
The research paper entitled “Awareness and Readiness for Graduate School of African American Male Computer Science Students” was accepted into the 3rd Annual Conference for Research on Equity & Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, & Technology (RESPECT) hosted in February 2018 in Baltimore, MD. Congratulations to the authors Earl Huff Jr. and Dr. Kinnis Gosha on their achievement. The paper provided significant insight into African American computer science students’ confidence levels, academic and technical capabilities, limitations of assistance, and likelihood in pursuing graduate education.
The Culturally Relevant Computing Lab and Benjamin E. Mays High School were selected as one of the six partnerships to receive the Innovation Fund Tiny Grant for 2017, with the award received being $6998. The goal of the Innovation Fund Tiny Grant was to develop programs in science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM). With this grant students will be provided mentors to help guide them through their virtual AP Computer Science courses. In addition to those students participating in the program, students enrolled in Georgia Virtual AP Computer Science and AP Computer Science Principles courses will also benefit from the Tiny Grant through tutoring and assistance
The Culturally Relevant Computing Lab has been awarded a contract by Clarkson Aerospace, LLC to conduct research in the area of cybersecurity. The research will be conducted primarily by members of Morehouse College, Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University Navy ROTC. The contract is set at $157,000 and runs for nine months. The research to be conducted will be in the area of social media data analysis and mining.
Dr. Kinnis Gosha, the founder of the Culturally Relevant Computing Lab at Morehouse College, will serve as co-Principal Investigator of the Increasing Minority Presence within Academia through Continuous Training (Impact) grant. This $299,856 award, funded by the National Science Foundation, Inclusion Across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (INCLUDES) program, is led by Georgia Institute of Technology, as a multi-institutional partnership. The focus of this project is to “impact the engineering faculty ecosystem by demonstrating a new method of support and engage diverse engineering faculty through retired and emeriti faculty who may have preceded them in their chosen field of study,” according to Dr. Comas Haynes of the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
Kinnis Gosha, PhD 