IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2014 - 16

can replicate that authentic experience
of doing that job first-hand," Villeneuve
says, and understanding how the pick,
pack, and ship process works, especially
for engineers looking at ways to continually enhance that process, is critical.
As someone who has twice returned to
school to challenge herself and broaden her
skill set, Villeneuve is proud of the educational benefits Kiva offers its employees. Kiva
provides generous tuition reimbursement
toward an advanced degree, and since Kiva
has virtually every type of engineering possible, as long as the degree is applicable to
Kiva, employees are encouraged to go for it.
"If you came in a mechanical engineer and
wanted to go for a computer science degree,"
she explains, "you could certainly do that."
With its acquisition by Amazon two
years old, Kiva continues to fold into the
larger company while at the same time
continuing to innovate. Villeneuve's goals
as they move forward are to continue
growing the company while maintaining

the start-up culture-the ping pong, the
air hockey, the holiday party, sure, but
especially those things that are particularly, organically Kiva, like Orange Week.
-Katianne Williams

Connecting the Arts
and Music to Science
and Engineering

Burg inspiring creative students
By combining her passion for teaching,
computer science, and art instead of
choosing one over the other, Jennifer
Burg inspires others and is creating better scientists and engineers. She provides a prime example of why it's great
to tackle multiple efforts in one's career.
As a piano player and computer science professor at Wake Forest University
in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Burg

has fashioned her professional life to
bring both visual and musical arts into
the science, technology, engineering,
and math (STEM) arena.
Burg says that visual arts can help scientists and engineers visualize abstract
concepts. It also allows them to see how
logic can engender art with their own eyes.
Burg's latest emphasis in the
arts is music, which she
says naturally attracts
students and has interesting mathematical and algorithmic
properties.

Practical Applications
in College Classes

Jennifer Burg

Burg created and teaches a course in digital sound and music in the Computer
Science (CS) Department at Wake Forest University. It covers topics like musical instrument digital interface (MIDI)
and acoustics, and students learn how to
apply computer programming to music
theory. The course is designed to attract
nontraditional entry-level students into
CS. Students complete hands-on projects
that encourage them to experiment with
a combination of digital recording, MIDI,
video, and computer programming of
sound and music "from scratch."
Burg also teaches a STEM Incubator course that uses a mentor/apprentice model, pairing freshmen with more
advanced students from the CS department who serve as mentors on projects.
This course is an intro level course for
students who aren't necessarily majoring
in CS but who may be attracted to the
subject through interesting and relevant
applications. She has taught it for two
semesters so far, and it attracts a good
number of women.
One course project used a Microsoft
Kinect camera to remotely sense body
movements as a way to train a person's
ear to recognize pitch. A student created a
system that teaches users about musical
pitches and intervals through bodily kinesthetic learning. Users position their hands
to represent their spatial sense of an octave
and then move them together to change
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MWIE.2014.2353273
Date of publication: 7 November 2014

IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

DECEMBER 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2014