Computing Students' Learning Difficulties in HCI Education

Oleson, Alannah; Solomon, Meron; Ko, Amy J.

doi:10.1145/3313831.3376149

Cited by 31 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…In the past decade, the adoption of design-focused practices in industry contexts has expanded dramatically [1,39], often through the incorporation of User Experience (UX)-focused roles that lead to greater focus on user needs [8]. In parallel with this shift from an industry perspective, HCI researchers have shown interest in describing the complexity of these practices [13,25,26,32], creating and documenting methods to support practitioner needs [15,28,34], and identifying key conceptual and educational barriers to the attainment of these skills and abilities [7,17,30,41]. While this dramatic shift in industry roles-supported by reports that design-focused companies have double the financial returns of their counterparts [39]-represents the promise of adopting user-centered approaches, little work has explored the interactions of front-line UX designers in realizing this design-centered vision.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tensions in Enacting a Design Philosophy in UX Practice

Watkins

Gray

Toombs

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

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Design culture is increasingly present within organizations, especially with the rise of UX as a profession. Yet there are often disconnects between the development of a design philosophy and its translation in practice. Students preparing for UX careers are positioned in a liminal space between their educational experience and future practice, and are actively working to build a bridge between their developing philosophy of design and the translation of that philosophy when faced with the complexity of design practice. In this study, we interviewed ten students and practitioners educated within design-oriented HCI programs, focusing on their design philosophy and evaluating how their philosophical beliefs were shaped in practice. Building on prior work on flows of competence, we thematically analyzed these interviews, identifying the philosophical beliefs of these designers and their trajectories of development, adoption, or suppression in industry. We identify opportunities for enhancements to UX educational practices and future research on design complexity in industry contexts.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tensions in Enacting a Design Philosophy in UX Practice

Watkins

Gray

Toombs

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

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“…Aberg [3] and Hui [14] surveyed instructors about challenges in teaching HCI courses, and Oleson et al [24] complemented those findings with student perspectives. One recurring theme was that students perceive the content in such courses to be too abstract, vague, and sometimes 'obvious' or 'common sense. '…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Five Pedagogical Principles of a User-Centered Design Course that Prepares Computing Undergraduates for Industry Jobs

Kross

Guo

2022

Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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We present a new user-centered design course that prepares computing undergraduates for software industry jobs such as UI/UX designer, product designer, and product manager. Our course aims to bridge the academia-industry gap and innovates upon prior published HCI courses due to its targeted focus on job preparation, inclusion, and scale. Nearly 200 students (55% women) have taken it in the past two years. We developed its curriculum to align with the needs of modern industry employers and implemented five theory-backed pedagogical principles: 1) industry-relevant project prompts developed in consultation with recent course alumni, 2) final project deliverable optimized for job-seeking, 3) no coding required to foster inclusion, 4) low-stress effort-based grading to further foster inclusion, 5) weekly feedback and chances for revisions. We discuss the theoretical rationale behind these five principles and how instructors can potentially apply them to a broad range of project-based courses across many areas of computing. CCS CONCEPTS• Social and professional topics → Computing education.

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“…Within educational research in computing, prior work has emphasized the importance of engaging and promoting motivation for student learning [50,56,65] with making and creating playing a pivotal role. Guzdial argues that, "A student who takes an introductory computer science course wants to make something.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward Video-Conferencing Tools for Hands-On Activities in Online Teaching

Labrie

Mok

Tang

et al. 2022

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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Many instructors in computing and HCI disciplines use hands-on activities for teaching and training new skills. Beyond simply teaching hands-on skills like sketching and programming, instructors also use these activities so students can acquire tacit skills. Yet, current video-conferencing technologies may not effectively support hands-on activities in online teaching contexts. To develop an understanding of the inadequacies of current video-conferencing technologies for hands-on activities, we conducted 15 interviews with university-level instructors who had quickly pivoted their use of hands-on activities to an online context during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on our analysis, we uncovered four pedagogical goals that instructors have when using hands-on activities online and how instructors were unable to adequately address them due to the technological limitations of current video-conferencing tools. Our work provides empirical data about the challenges that many instructors experienced, and in so doing, the pedagogical goals we identify provide new requirements for video-conferencing systems to better support hands-on activities.

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Computing Students' Learning Difficulties in HCI Education

Cited by 31 publications

References 54 publications

Tensions in Enacting a Design Philosophy in UX Practice

Tensions in Enacting a Design Philosophy in UX Practice

Five Pedagogical Principles of a User-Centered Design Course that Prepares Computing Undergraduates for Industry Jobs

Toward Video-Conferencing Tools for Hands-On Activities in Online Teaching

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