Shahnaz Kamberi

Mason CS associate professor Shahnaz Kamberi
Titles and Organizations

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

Contact Information

Campus: Fairfax
Building: Nguyen Engineering Building
Room 2706
Email: kamberis@gmu.edu
Phone: 703-993-6825

Personal Websites

Biography

Shahnaz Kamberi is an educational game and ed-tech designer and developer and a serious games-published researcher. Kamberi has taught computer science and computer game programming courses for over twelve years at multiple levels, both onsite and online.

Kamberi is a STEM research and outreach professional responsible for focusing on engaging students in the classroom through new innovative teaching methods. She developed an educational video game to teach Java programming to adolescent girls, in hopes of increasing their interest in further studying computer science. She volunteers her time and makes every effort to increase the number of women and minorities in the computer science industry.

Her research field is in serious games and virtual worlds, more specifically in designing and developing games for education and training. She focuses on gender-inclusive and gender-neutral video game designs. Her teaching philosophy is “it is no longer teacher as presenter of content; it is a teacher as a designer of learning spaces and experiences.” She strives to remain flexible and apply real-world examples and hands-on approaches to learning; to keep her students engaged. As a professor and an avid STEM education researcher and promoter, she continues to experiment and learn about different teaching methods. While some methods work and some methods do not, it is her constant application of different approaches that challenges her students and helps them not only understand the course material but also apply what they have learned.

Degrees

  • Doctor of Science, Computer Science, Colorado Technical University
  • Master of Science, Computer Animation, Bournemouth University
  • Bachelor of Science, Applied Mathematics, George Mason University