Amber Solomon

Georgia Institute of Technology | GT · School of Interactive Computing

Modern learning theories emphasize the critical social aspect of learning. Computer science (CS) classrooms often have "defensive climates'' that inhibit social learning and prevent the development of a community of learners. We believe that we can improve the social context of computer science learning by expanding CS learning beyond the single st...

Socioeconomic status (SES) has a measurable impact on many educational outcomes and likely also influences computer science (CS) achievement. We present a novel model to account for the observed connections between SES and CS achievement. We examined possible mediating variables between SES and CS achievement, including spatial ability and access t...

Gestures, or spontaneous hand movements produced when talking, are an untapped resource for understanding student knowledge in computing education. This paper develops a conceptual framework to support future studies of learning and teaching that incorporate gesture studies in programming contexts. In particular, this paper introduces how gesture h...

Computer science teachers want to know what their students are and are not learning and understanding. Gestures, or spontaneous hand movements produced when talking, could help teachers understand what their students are thinking. During communication, gestures often reflect thoughts not expressed when people talk (Goldin-Meadow & Wagner, 2005). Li...

Spatial reasoning may be a strong predictor for a career in Computer Science (CS) [9]. However, it is unclear why and how spatial abilities lead to success in CS. Investigating the role of spatial reasoning in learning CS may be important for broadening participation. Most students who excel in CS are white males or students from a high socioeconom...

Parents’engagementintheirchildren’seducationiskeytochildren’s academic success and social development. For many parents in the U.S., engagement is still a struggle partly due to a lack of communication and community-building tools that support the broader ecology of parenting, or parental ecology. Although current technologies have the potential to...

Parents' engagement in their children's education is key to chil-dren's academic success and social development. For many parents in the U.S., engagement is still a struggle partly due to a lack of communication and community-building tools that support the broader ecology of parenting, or parental ecology. Although current technologies have the po...

Spatial reasoning concerns the locations of objects, their shapes, their relations to each other, and the paths they take as they move. People with high spatial reasoning scores are more likely to major in degrees in STEM disciplines and go into STEM careers than those with low scores. Spatial reasoning tends to be low amongst students of low socio...

Prime III is a multimodal voting system that allows users to use touch or voice to make selections on their ballot. This paper discusses an experiment that evaluated the system's speech recognition at various levels of background noise. An approach to simulate realistic background noise in a controlled environment is described. This approach helped...

Among every adult, social skills have, in some way, affected the outcome of communal situations and quite possibly the quality of everyone’s social life at some point. Yang describes social skills as a, “complex set of skills that include the development of effective social behaviors, an awareness of the social norms that affect social behavior in...