My Biography
Yerika Jimenez is an undergraduate student at Kean University (www.kean.edu), majoring in Computer Science. In 2011, during the scholar year 2011 – 2012, Yerika was a volunteer member of the Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates (CREU) research team funded by the CRA-W from this research a research paper was published, “Attracting High School Students to Computing: A Case Study with Drag-Drop Interfaces” in the ED Media conference. Which obtained the First Place Best Research Paper Award, as well as the First Place Best Undergraduate Research Project Award according to the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. Yerika presented two posters of the research project one at Research Day at Kean University in April 2012 and the second at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in October 2012.
In the spring of 2012, Yerika became part of the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Program at Kean University. This program prepares underrepresented and first-generation undergraduate students to pursue a doctoral degree. Yerika’s research project during the summer was supervised under the mentorship of Dr. Patricia Morreale. They created a predicted model for smart phone selection, because selecting a mobile phone has become very subjective in recent years. Her summer 2012 work will be published as “Design and Evaluation of a Predictive Model for Smart Phone Selection”, in Proceedings of the 15th International Conf. on Human- Computer Interaction (HCI), Las Vegas, Nevada, July 21-26, 2013. This research obtained Second Place Best Research Paper Award and was accepted for the upcoming Grace Hopper Computing Conference poster and ACM Student Research Competition presentation.
During the fall 2012, the Louis Stoke Alliance for Minority Program selected Yerika Jimenez as a scholar. She was also select for the Student Organization Memorial scholarship.
In summer 2013, Yerika got accepted to the Distributed Research Experience for Undergraduates (DREU) summer research program at Clemson University in the Human Centered Computing Lab. She is currently working on two research projects. The first project is called WATCH-Workshop of African Americans thinking computationally and historically: Rediscovering and Recreating African American Historical Accounts through Mobile App. This project seeks to investigate how African Americans students’ engagement with technology through mobile apps and visitations to South Carolina’s African American historical sites can promote learning in history education. The second project is Physical Computing: Video Game and Controller Design. The goal of the project is to design and implement a study of a physical computing summer camp where middle and high school students will design a 2D video game using game maker and an arduino-based game controller.