Deanna Kocher of Alden, NY receives the Lehigh University Libraries Student Research Prize

2017 Mar 29

Deanna Kocher of Alden, NY was awarded the Lehigh University Libraries Student Research Prize for Spring 2017.

Kocher, '17, is a senior in the Lehigh University IDEAS (Integrated Degree in Engineering, Arts and Sciences) program, and she is minoring in Science, Technology, and Society. Deanna researched and wrote Children's concept of animacy: the humanoid robot and the robotic human for Professor Amanda Brandone's Psychology course, Children's Thinking. In this paper, Deanna investigates what behavioral and intellectual capabilities change a child's perception of an object's animacy.

Deanna's interest in this topic was sparked by interactions with children. "They perceive robots differently than adults -- for instance, Furbies and Tomagotchis are very 'real' to children." The review group was impressed with the originality of the topic and Deanna's mastery and synthesis of the relevant literature and strong grasp of the prose of scientific methodology and communication.

Dr. Brandone, writes, "Deanna isolated a gap in the literature that deserves further research. Her design choices were well motivated and resulted in a clever research design that I would like to see carried out!"

Deanna is a Rossin Junior Fellow, a Community Service Office Tutor, and she participates in Women's Club Soccer. She is involved in Engineers without Borders and is working on a Campus Furniture Design Team this year.

After graduating, Deanna will continue at Lehigh as a Presidential Scholar; she will look at how designers create technologies that encourage use/overuse, and then apply this knowledge to create technologies with socially beneficial designs.

Prize Details

Deanna will receive a $500 check and a certificate of recognition and their papers will become part of the Lehigh Libraries digital archive, Lehigh Preserve. Awards will be presented at the 2017 Symposium on Teaching and Learning at Lehigh University.

Sponsorship

The Prize is sponsored by Library and Technology Services and the Friends of the University Libraries. The selection process is rigorous and involves two phases of review. First, a team of research librarians reviews the pool of applicants and selects papers to go to a faculty review group. In the second phase, a faculty review group selects the winner(s) from the finalist pool. This year, librarians narrowed the submissions from a pool of over forty-five applications to a small pool of finalists. Faculty reviewers selected Deanna's research paper from these very strong finalist papers.