Team projects are nowadays common practice in HCI education. This paper focuses on the role of clients and users in team projects in introductory HCI courses. In order to provide projects with a realistic context we invite people from industry to serve as clients for the student teams. Some of them have a professional interest in participating in our course and define a project themselves. Another way we make projects realistic is to have teams evaluate their designs with real users.We describe how we incorporate the role of clients and users in our courses and describe our experiences. One of the results of our evaluations is that most students find it very interesting and stimulating to work with a client on a 'real' project from industry.

Modern technology offers the tools for having synchronous virtual classes. This paper reports about experiences of such a class in the context of distance education. The paper focuses on the tool as well as on the pedagogy. It outlines the pedagogical approach of the virtual class, which is an adaptation of good practices of face-to-face classes. The results of an experiment are discussed. Strong and weak aspects of synchronous virtual classes are identified.

Abstraction is viewed as a key concept in computer science. It is not only an important concept but also one that is difficult to master. This paper focuses on the problems that novices experience when they first encounter this concept. Three assignments from introductory courses are analyzed, to understand why abstraction is difficult for novices. This analysis leads to a number of guidelines that can be used by instructors to support novices learning abstraction.

This paper describes a one semester research course for undergraduates of computing programs. Students formulate a research proposal, conduct research and write a full paper. They present the results at a one-day student conference. On the one hand we offer the students a lot of structure and support; on the other hand an important feature of the course is that they are in control of their own research. A key aspect of the pedagogical approach is that the students are supervised in small teams by experienced staff. The results of evaluations show that the students are positive about the course. One of the main findings is that they feel well prepared to conduct research in the graduate program.

Team projects are nowadays common practice in HCI education. This paper focuses on the role of clients and users in team projects in introductory HCI courses. In order to provide projects with a realistic context we invite people from industry to serve as clients for the student teams. Some of them have a professional interest in participating in our course and define a project themselves. Another way we make projects realistic is to have teams evaluate their designs with real users.We describe how we incorporate the role of clients and users in our courses and describe our experiences. One of the results of our evaluations is that most students find it very interesting and stimulating to work with a client on a 'real' project from industry.