“Applying for a Fulbright is an arduous process, but well worth the effort,” Kershner said. She applied for the program, which awards grants for international research and teaching assistantships, while looking into graduate school and worked with NC State’s Coordinator of Distinguished Scholarships and Fellowships, Tiffany Kershner, to fulfill all the scholarship requirements. The Fulbright provided an opportunity for Harris to continue her studies in Germany. There, among several other projects, she studied whether static images or videos were better for teaching someone American Sign Language.
Harris also served as a research assistant in the Learning, Aging and Cognitive Ergonomics (LACE) Lab. Serving under the lab’s co-director Jason Allaire, she worked on a variety of projects, including one in which she observed how a commercial video game, “StarCraft 2,” helped the cognitive abilities of older adults. While at NC State, she served as an undergraduate researcher in the Department of Psychology’s Gains through Gaming Lab, which examines the relationship between video games and important psychological constructs. In addition to a background in German language and culture, Harris also has some experience with the gaming portion of her current project. “At moments I thought I was crazy, too, but I wanted to pick it up and did.”
“Many of my friends thought I was crazy, since I was taking Spanish at the time and had to go to German class right after Spanish,” Harris said. German is one of 15 languages the department teaches, and German Studies is one of its four major concentrations. She took those curiosities with her to college, where she decided to learn German through NC State’s Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. Thanks to books like “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” and meeting two influential German women when she was a child, Harris said she became interested in German culture at a young age. “Hopefully this game offers another option for those who want to learn German Sign Language.” “If you want to learn sign language, you either have to find ways to teach yourself or find a course,” Harris said. She’ll also be working with the Sign Language Lab at Georg-August Universität in Göttingen, Germany. Matthias Rötting of the Technische Universität. To create the game, Harris is taking courses in sign language in Berlin with her faculty adviser, Dr. Harris, who earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology in May 2015, is one of three recent College of Humanities and Social Sciences graduates who received a Fulbright grant this year. As a 2015-16 Fulbright Scholar, Harris is in Berlin working to develop the game, tentatively called “Chatty Hands,” that will help teach German Sign Language.
That question served as the impetus for a video game that Harris, a recent NC State graduate, is creating overseas. “Why are there so few technological resources for learning and using sign language?” As Harris looked through the dictionary with a friend at a library, she pondered a question:
It was a perfectly reasonable place to start, and as she quickly learned, one of the only places, too. When Maurita Harris set out to learn American Sign Language, she started with an ASL dictionary.
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