Kate Lockwood, assistant professor of computer science and information technology, has been honored with the Allen Griffin Award for excellence in teaching at the post-secondary level. The award is sponsored by the Community Foundation for Monterey County.

Established in 1982, the Griffin Award was created by a bequest from the late Col. Allen Griffin, former publisher of the Monterey Herald and founder and former board president of the Community Foundation. The award honors teachers who have a record of sustained excellence in the classroom and who have made a significant impact in the community.

Dr. Lockwood joined CSUMB in 2009, and has taught a variety of courses in programming, digital games and other computer-related classes. She has developed innovative teaching methods for her classes, and has presented these methods in workshops for her campus colleagues, at CSU-wide seminars and at international conferences on computer science education.

Among her teaching innovations is use of the “inverted classroom.” The concept swaps what has traditionally been done at home and what has been done in class. Students watch videos of lectures and interactive exercises at home, and then use valuable in-class time for discussion, hands-on experiences and small-group activities.

This summer, she has been invited to a university in Sweden to teach faculty members in several departments how to integrate the inverted classroom into their teaching.

In addition to teaching, mentoring and advising students, she chairs the Faculty Senate’s Technology Committee, sits on a variety of campus committees and working groups, and leads teaching and learning workshops for other CSUMB faculty members. And she maintains an active research program in artificial intelligence, focusing on programming systems that can engage in spatial reasoning.

In the community, she has worked with local high school students competing in a national robotics competition and helps with programming workshops where students learn basic skills before the competition season begins. During the summer, she has been involved with running computer science workshops for at-risk high school students.

She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University, an M.S. in information and a bachelor’s in computer engineering from the University of Michigan. Her research interests include artificial intelligence.

Griffin Award winners from CSUMB include Aparna Sreenivasan, Kent Adams, Pat Tinsley McGill and Scott Waltz. The award was given annually until 2011, when the Community Foundation changed to an every-other-year schedule.

Learn more about Dr. Lockwood.

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Students from Dr. Lockwood's First Year Seminar class in 2010 face off in a robot competition