Iteration is a central to HCI design. The learning objectives of this introductory HCI class activity is to experience and recognize the importance of iteration in the HCI design process, and to practice how small iterative design changes and consistent implementation and evaluation can have on the overall design.

In this class activity, HCI students practice the iterative design process in a rapid and engaging activity. The activity includes three iterations of playing a simple game (tic-tac-toe) in small groups of 2-3 students and changing the rules of the game from one iteration to the next. In the first iteration (baseline), students play the original tic-tac-toe game. Thereafter, in each iteration, students choose and make one change to one rule of the game in its current iteration, play the modified game, and evaluate the impact of the change on the game experience. By the end of the activity, the new game that underwent 3 changes may be substantially different from the original tic-tac-toe game.

This final project combines key CS1 programming concepts with ethical analysis. It helps students gain experience with lists, dictionaries, for/while loops, conditional statements, file handling, and functions in Python. Through a data analysis and visualization task, the students put to action their prior knowledge of the aforementioned programming concepts, embedded with an ethics-led discussion of open source data. Open source data (or “open data”) is data that is available and accessible to anyone, including for reuse of the data [8]. Students will learn how to think critically about the ethical dimensions of their selected open source data (and future open source data), and provide an analysis of the data within its contemporary cultural context.

ACM Digital Library Entry

This lab helps students gain experience and proficiency with alternative modalities for browsing the web (i.e., navigation using the keyboard and using screen readers). Students will learn how to perform a website accessibility evaluation using a keyboard and screen reader. Students will also gain an appreciation for the prevalence of web accessibility issues, and will reflect on what can be done to improve web accessibility.

ACM Digital Library Entry

Coverage of ethics and computing is proliferating at universities, at both undergraduate and graduate levels. This includes standalone courses, and incorporation of ethics into technical computer science and related courses. Most of these courses, particularly the standalone ones, make extensive use of recent media articles, papers, videos, and other resources about issues related to ethics and computing. Thousands of such media articles alone are published annually. There is enormous duplication of effort by people who are teaching these courses, as discovering these resources is not always an easy process.

This assignment is designed for an introductory human-computer interaction course. Students identify usability issues in everyday things. For example, confusing light switches, street signs, mobile applications, gaming consoles, or microwave ovens. There are three learning objectives: 1) demonstrate the ability to notice the usability of everyday things, 2) correctly apply usability terms and concepts, and 3) design a solution that addresses an identified weakness.

ACM Digital Library Entry

This group discussion activity helps students to explore how people socially respond to communication technology by explaining and applying the Media Equation and the Computers are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm for the study of human-technology interaction. Students will learn how to evaluate and apply CASA to human-technology interaction by discussing agents and technologies portrayed in science fiction movie trailers containing examples of virtual agents with social characteristics.

ACM Digital Library Entry

Teaching students how to design and evaluate technology user experiences should be centered around understanding real-world user needs. In this project, students focus on a particular domain, Citizen Science, to motivate their learning of user research, prototyping, and usability testing. Citizen Science projects study phenomena in nature and the environment, such as monitoring the spread of invasive plant species or water quality. Citizen Science projects depend on volunteers to collect and submit data from local environments. Citizen Science is a compelling context for user-centered design because it involves multiple stakeholder groups, various front-end technologies (e.g., web and mobile), and information architecture. This project is scoped for a user-centered design and usability testing course for undergraduate computer science students. The course learning objectives are to (1) use research and design methods to develop an understanding of technology stakeholders and (2) apply that knowledge to create and refine design artifacts.

This user-centered design project invites students to conduct hands-on human-computer interaction research and design by exploring affect-aware technology. These technologies seek to account for users’ emotions, moods, and other affective phenomena in the user experience. Examples include emojis used while texting, social robots that model emotional responses, and emotionally-aware chatbots. This project is for a user-centered design and usability testing course offered to undergraduate computer science students. The course learning objectives are to use research and design methods to (1) build an empirical understanding of technology stakeholders and (2) apply that knowledge to design and evaluate an interactive prototype. By immersing themselves in the complex domain of affect-aware computing, students learn to apply user-centered design to emerging technologies. Students create and refine common user-centered design artifacts, including personas, interaction designs, and prototypes. The reader of this paper will obtain recommendations for structuring the user-centered design projectand a high-level understanding of affect-aware computing.

Meme Magic is a series of six assignments intended to provide progressive exposure to programming in Java using a popular and recent concept: Memes. Memes utilize an image conveying a concept or feeling with a caption provided by the Meme author. The series of assignments, designed as sprints in the context of a larger project, begin with the design and scaffolding of Java classes needed to write a program to produce text-based Memes and end with a fully-functional graphical user interface. For a detailed list of learning goals, please see the Learning Goals section. In the first sprint, students depict the overall project structure of a text-based meme application using Unified Markup Language (UML) and write method stubs in Java. In each of the next two sprints, students implement half of the specified functionality and integrate those components to a fully working application. Students are asked to add Comparators to sort memes to their application in sprint 4 and to unit test all of their code using JUnit in sprint 5. In the final sprint, students extend the functionality once more to a graphical user interface to experience event-driven programming.

The Micro:Vote project is designed as an introduction to text- based programming through a 12-week project aimed at 11 to 13 year olds. The project is designed as a School-University partnership whose aim is to highlight the role of creativity and social impact in computing through the design of digital voting posters using the BBC micro:bit and MicroPython.

Adopting a Design Studio approach, the project scaffolds students in the creation of a physical computing voting system and informative poster, to gather responses on an issue of social importance within the community. Through the lens of Human- Computer Interaction, students investigate the role of computing in activism and learn to implement data and control structures.

ACM Digial Library Entry