My research complements my teaching in the Computing in the Arts program and explores novel interaction metaphors in which creative human artists collaborate with intelligent software assistants and contextualizing computing education in the arts to broaden participation. My Computer Science education research seeks to apply creative applications of computing in an effort to broaden participation in computing.
Link to Google Scholar Citations
Computer Science Education Research (click to learn more)
My work explores developing and evaluating new ways to teach computing contextualized in the visual arts and film as a way to make mathematics and computing more accesible so as to broaden participation by women and underrepresented populations.
Selected Research Projects
Story Blocker (click to learn more)
Enhanced Web-based collaborative environment for teaching film techniques. Story Blocker adds authoring tools to define characters, movie scripts, shot lists, and block and edit virtual movie scenes.
Film Ties (click to learn more)
Initial version of a Web-based collaborative environment to create, share, and critique short virtual 3-D animated movies. Featured intelligent recommendation of virtual 3-D shot critiques to other users who created similar shots in compatible story contexts.
Director’s Lens (click to learn more)
Introduces a new workflow for movie-making in which a human cinematographer collaborates with an intelligent assistant that learns composition and editing tendencies of the cinematographer’s previously recorded shots. Although the system relied on a hand-coded set of fifteen basic shot types, it was the first to dynamically learn a transition matrix that models the probability of cutting from one type of shot to another.
Highlights of Summer Research with Students (click to learn more)
Like many faculty at College of Charleston I involve undergraduates in my research projects. The summer is typically my most productive time for research. I have welcomed area high school students, College of Charleston students, and international exchange students from LaRochelle, France.