Category: Research

In October of 2020, a new book was released by Kendall Hunt Publishing Company entitled, “Navigating the Peer Mentoring Relationship: A Handbook for Women and Other Underrepresented Populations in STEM”. Congratulations to Dr. Kinnis Gosha for co-authoring chapter 8 entitled “Using Virtual Platforms to Facilitate Peer Mentoring Relationships”.

Dr. Kinnis Gosha, Culturally Relevant Computing Lab (CRCL) Director, manuscript submission titled, “Improving Computing Science Instruction for African American Secondary School Students: A Focus Group Exploration of Computing Identities of African American Teachers” was  accepted into the 2019 ACM SIGMIS Computers and People Research (CPR) Conference. This conference will be held June 20-22 in Nashville, Tennessee.

The ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) on Management Information Systems (MIS) promotes best-practice and research in the management of information systems and technologies in management commerce. SIGMIS is a founder of ISWorld Net at http://www.isworld.org, and a sponsor of several conferences on information systems and technology. As one of the oldest of ACM’s SIG’s, SIGMIS traces its beginnings back to 1961, and for forty years has been instrumental in defining and developing the field of management and information systems.

Researchers from the Culturally Relevant Computing Lab (CRCL) in the Computer Science Department at Morehouse College recently submitted an abstract titled, “Exploring the Needs and Preferences of Underrepresented Minority Students for an Intelligent Virtual Mentoring System” to the 2019 HCI International Conference. Their abstract was accepted as a poster for publication in the conference proceedings and presentation. The authors of this abstract are Naja A. Mack, Research Scientist; Earl W. Huff Research Scientist; Robert Cummings, Postbaccalaureate Researcher; and Dr. Kinnis Gosha, Hortenius I. Chenault Endowed Associate Professor and Director of Non-Traditional Academic Initiatives.

The HCI International 2019 is the 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. It will take place July 26th-30th at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Orlando area, Florida, USA, under the auspices of 18 distinguished international boards.

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.

A group of black computer science students in the Morehouse College Culturally Relevant Computing Lab at the ACM Southeast Conference.

Four members of the Culturally Relevant Computing Lab presented their research this weekend at the ACM Southeast Conference. The title of the poster presentation was entitled “Introduction to Computer Science for Urban African American Students Using Sphero Robotics Workshop”. The four students consisted of Trey Ridley, Ernest Holmes, Kevin Womack and Jordan Scott from Morehouse College. An abstract from the submission is provided below:

This paper introduces the use of an all-day coding workshop as an intervention to introduce and expose African American high school students from a southeastern urban school district to coding and computing careers. The workshop is held at a local HBCU and led by African American undergraduates computer science majors who attend that HBCU. The workshop is focused on a robotic ball called an Sphero that allows users to control its motion and color by writing lines of code. Results from workshop showed an increase of interest in pursuing a career in computing after graduation compared to interest before the start of the workshop.

A manuscript co-authored by Dr. Kinnis Gosha entitled “Holistic Development of Underrepresented Students through Academic – Industry Partnerships” has been accepted for publication in the conference proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education Conference. The conference will be held in Seattle, Washington on March 8th – 11th, 2017. Co-authors include Marlon Mejias (Howard University), Legand Burge (Howard University), Kamar Galloway (Google) and Jean Muhammad (Hampton University). More information about the conference can be found at http://sigcse2017.sigcse.org.