Teaching HCI Skills in Higher Education through Game Design: A Study of Students’ Perceptions

Abstract

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is an area with a wide range of concepts and knowledge. Therefore, a need to innovate in the teaching-learning processes to achieve an effective education arises. This article describes a proposal for teaching HCI through the development of projects that allow students to acquire higher education competencies through the design and evaluation of computer games. Finally, an empirical validation (questionnaires and case study) with 40 undergraduate students (studying their fifth semester of software engineering) was applied at the end of the semester. The results indicated that this teaching method provides the students with the HCI skills (psychology of everyday things, involving users, task-centered system design, models of human behavior, creativity and metaphors, and graphical screen design) and, more importantly, they have a positive perception on the efficacy of the use of videogame design in a higher education course.

Applying the TPACK model to HCI Education: Relationships between Perceived Instructional Quality and Teacher Knowledge

“…The HCI community is increasingly involved in sharing teaching experiences for the benefit of their peers. Papers reporting on HCI courses [14,22,37,69] and on more specific methods such as design studio [31,67] or project-based [70,73] approaches have been published. However, studies on HCI teaching and education, specifically those that involve empirical data, are scarce -one example can be found in de Souza Vieira et al [80].…”

Experiential Learning to Teach User Experience in Higher Education in Past 20 Years: A Scoping Review

“…Lastly, students expressed satisfaction toward various aspects of a given pedagogical approach (n = 10), including UX project participation (MacDonald and Rozaklis, 2017), graduate student mentorship (Brown and Pastel, 2009), and the use of videogames as a teaching tool (Santana-Mancilla et al, 2019).…”

Gamification and Advanced Technology to Enhance Motivation in Education

“…A different case, but also very interesting, is the analysis of games to study aspects that are an intrinsic part of video games, such as their interaction, usability, visual design, or the artificial intelligence of their characters. This is the case of the work of Pedro C. Santana-Mancilla, Miguel A. Rodriguez-Ortiz, Miguel A. Garcia-Ruiz, Laura S. Gaytan-Lugo, Silvia B. Fajardo-Flores, and Juan Contreras-Castillo [6], which studies aspects of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) through the analysis of video games. From our point of view, this paper makes two key contributions: a proposal for using the design and evaluation of computer games as a learning tool to teach HCI to undergraduate students; and the empirical validation of this proposal to explore students' attitudes with the aim to understand if the students believe that using video games allows them to learn higher education skills.…”