Background
Kendra Walther is a senior lecturer at the University of Southern California, and oversees the Programming minor in the Information Technology Program at the Viterbi School of Engineering. Kendra earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College in 2000, and a master’s degree in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park in 2004. She has worked for the Aerospace Corporation and taught Computer Science at Cal State LA, St. Albans School, and Milwaukee School of Engineering. In addition, Kendra is an active community volunteer for a diverse set of activities.
Academic Interests
Kendra believes in lifelong learning, and really enjoys learning about how people learn best. She is an active member of SIGCSE (the ACM special interest group for computer science education) and loves to bring new ideas and teaching methodologies into her classroom. Kendra is an enthusiastic and passionate teacher who cares for her students.
As part of her initiatives to improve undergraduate education, Kendra participated in the IntroCS POGIL project and helped lead efforts for more engineering faculty at Viterbi to use POGIL in their classrooms. Kendra is also involved in the Teach Access and Access Computing communities, which both promote inclusivity and diversity within computer science, with the idea that diversity includes disabilities. In the summer of 2019, Kendra was a faculty advisor in the Teach Access Study Away Program, helped lead the student project groups, continues to further explore new ways to make technology even more accessible by serving on the Teach Access Student Task Force.