Female In REsearch Network (FIRE)MEMBER
PROF DR KAY Berkling
Prof. Dr. Kay Berkling has dedicated her career to applying technology to address challenges in education and childhood learning. With a PhD in language identification, her early work focused on foreign-accented speech and speech synthesis for children. Over time, her research shifted toward practical applications in education, such as gamified learning tools and data-driven insights into orthography acquisition.
Her academic career has taken her to institutions in Puerto Rico and Germany, where she has focused on teaching and program development. Currently, she serves as General Director of the fully online Computer Science program at DHBW Mosbach. During her tenure on the ISCA Board (2015–2019), she proposed initiatives for hybrid and online conferences and fostered collaborations between PhD students and under-resourced universities.
Kay has been active in developing educational tools, including the Phontasia platform for teaching reading, which won the NEO 2016 Innovation Prize for Gamification in Education. She also contributed to the EU-funded iRead project, collecting large datasets to study literacy development in schools. Additionally, her work includes the creation of longitudinal corpora of children’s writing, now distributed through open source organizations, which provide valuable resources for language education research. Her contributions reflect a consistent focus on bridging the gap between technology and education, emphasizing inclusion and accessibility.
University: DHBW Stuttgart
Position: Professor
Research areas: Orthography recognition, but that’s too exotic, so I moved to research about higher education, open teaching methodologies through game-based design. Currently my focus is on developing EU standardized interoperability between higher education institutions.
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-1186-5678
Email: Kay.berkling [at] mosbach.dhbw.de
