Dominic Thomas
Alongside my research, a consistent thread in my teaching has been getting students hands-on with emerging technology before it becomes mainstream. At Kennesaw State, I worked with our IS core faculty to develop 3D printing activities and scale them across both online and in-person sections — work that won a statewide Digital Transformation of the Year award from the Technology Association of Georgia in 2022, recognizing growth to more than 5,000 new student users per year, and led to peer-reviewed scholarship including “Laying the Groundwork for STEAM: Scaling and Supporting 3D Design and Printing in Higher Education” in Frontiers in Education. The Coles College Dean selected the project for a KSU Pecha Kucha presentation to the university President and Board of Trustees.
That same instinct — give students a real, current technology and a real problem — shaped my core undergraduate programming course, IS 3020 Application Development. I rebuilt it around project-based learning, collaborative problem-solving, and a conversion from its original language to Python, changes that more than doubled student demand for the course. I also developed and taught one of the first courses on blockchain for business, published as “Optimized Emerging Technology IS Course Design: Blockchain for Business Example” in Communications of the AIS, and separately built a domain analysis making the case for “Information Systems as the Strategic Computing Degree” — an attempt to bring clarity to a persistent source of confusion for students and parents about how IS differs from CS and IT.
On the co-curricular side, I co-founded and have run two of the largest competitive learning events in the Coles College calendar: the Apps for Wellbeing Hackathon, which grew from its 2022 founding (with student leaders from the Business Technology Club, Girls Who Code, and Women in Technology) to more than 200 competitors in 2025, and the Marketing Innovation and Technology Strategy (MITS) competition, co-founded with Professor Laurie Michaelson and the Kennesaw Marketing Association, which puts cross-disciplinary student teams against an industry-sponsored case each fall. That cross-department collaboration earned Coles College’s Distinguished Collaboration Award in 2024. A newer generative-AI content-creation competition, developed with industry partner Tokio Marine, led directly to two student hires.
The common design principle behind all of it: whether the technology is 3D printing, blockchain, or generative AI, students retain almost nothing from a lecture about a technology and a great deal from building something with it under real constraints — a client, a deadline, a judge, or a genuine workplace problem.