Modeling is commonly employed in school settings to help students develop an understanding of biological systems [3]. By inspecting and modifying the inner workings of their models, students become familiar with causal factors and how they impact the properties of the model. We believe that allowing students to tinker with computational models involves developing the same skills used in computational thinking, such as abstraction, decomposition, analysis, automation, and generalization. In this poster, we discuss the design and implementation of a simulation that models the growth and spread of a hypothetical disease. The goal is to help middle school students develop computational thinking skills while learning how a virus spreads through the human population.

This ”Full Paper” in the ”Innovative Practice Category” describes a 3 year study of communication and collaboration within small teams composed of CS and Communication students developing citizen science applications for sponsoring scientists. To evaluate the communication within the teams, an end of the semester survey asked students to rate the quality of their communication within their own discipline and with the other discipline. Our goal is that students should rate the quality of communication equally. Our method for improving the collaboration uses a variety of ethnographic techniques to discover the likely influences and barriers to team collaboration and communication. We then modify the collaboration of the classes to mollify the barriers. After three years of collaboration, we learned that classes meeting at the same time in adjacent classrooms, so as to create time and place for teams to meet, were not sufficient to improve communication. For the collaboration within the team and the communication quality to reach parity between the disciplines, the instructors need to clearly demonstrate shared goals for the courses and create a common language by giving multiple joint lectures.

Experience working in multidisciplinary teams is important both to prepare Computer Science (CS) students for industry and to improve their communication with teammates from disciplines other than their own. This article describes the evolution and results of collaborations among three courses: an undergraduate CS course about user interface design and implementation, an undergraduate Scientific and Technical Communication (STC) course about usability and instructions writing, and a graduate CS/Human Factors course about user-interface evaluation and usability testing. Students from all three courses work with scientists to complete the scientist-sponsored citizen science Android applications (apps). Students from the undergraduate CS and STC courses form multidisciplinary teams to design and implement apps, while the graduate students consult with the teams by evaluating and user-testing the apps. The collaboration's effectiveness was assessed using student surveys, interviews, and evaluations of student work. This article compares the collaboration within the teams and the coordination with the scientists across two years of activities in order to determine the effectiveness of course modifications. The article concludes with recommendations for improving the collaboration within teams and the coordination with clients in multidisciplinary course projects.

This HCI course incorporated unit testing as a quality improvement initiative with an Experiential Learning Model. The focus of the research was on observation and conceptualization---students should be able to associate the benefits of usability and unit testing and apply them to more general situations. Based on our survey results and student interviews, the most difficult challenge incorporating unit testing in an experiential course was ensuring students overcome their negative bias to discover the benefits of functional testing. We recommend emphasizing the concrete benefits of unit tests and ensuring that all students fully participate in the testing experience.

The JUnit Generation (JUG) system provides fast, semiautomated feedback to students. It uses a Java-like script to generate unit tests and time complexity tests, then runs those tests to generate reports. The goals for JUG are improved feedback for students, and decreased preparation and grading time for instructors and grading assistants.

We developed combined graduate and undergraduate courses in which undergraduates created a prototype based on user-centered design, and graduate students worked with them to evaluate those prototypes based on common usability principles. It provided undergraduate students experience practicing user centered design, while providing graduate students experience with usability evaluation. It also provided graduate students the opportunity to introduce current HCI research areas to students who may be considering graduate school. The course successfully engaged both graduate and undergraduate students while providing a beneficial experience through their interactions.

The steering law is intended to predict the performance of cursor manipulations in user interfaces, but the law has been verified for only a few path shapes and should be verified for more if it is to be generalized. This study extends the steering law to paths with corners. Two experiments compare the movement times of negotiating paths with corners to straight paths with the same width and movement amplitude. The experimental results show a significant effect on the movement times due to the corners, extending far into the legs of the path's corner. Modeling the results using resource theory, a cognitive theory for divided attention, suggests that steering through corners is two simultaneous tasks: steering along the legs of the corner and aiming at the corner.

Undergraduate computer science students have few opportunities to experience scientific investigation and computer science research. A human-computer interaction (HCI) course can offer many opportunities for research that are accessible to undergraduate students, and because of the similarity between the design and research processes, a design project based HCI course is particularly suited to introducing undergraduate computer science students to the research process. In this paper, we describe and discuss the challenges of integrating research projects into a design HCI course. We also present example research projects and discuss the feedback form students attending the course.

While developing the Simple Gesturing User Interface (SGUI) API for incorporating simple gestures into personal digital assistant (PDA) user interfaces, we developed an object-based HCI model and design process. The model assists designing direct manipulation interfaces by proposing that all interface objects are amenable to user manipulation. The model extends object-action interface models by emphasizing the relationship between the interface objects and their actions, object-action associations. We delineate three association properties: directness, localness, and appropriateness. We illustrate the design process and the utility of SGUI by developing Experimental Assistant, a graphing software for high school science experiments on the PDA.

We introduce the simple gesturing user interface (SGUI), an application programming interface (API) for designing user interfaces utilizing simple gesturing on the personal digital assistant (PDA). SGUI is particularly appropriate for PDA interfaces because the simple gestures are recognized using minimum processing power and reserve all of the small display for user-task specific information. A graphing-software implemented on a PDA using SGUI illustrates the usability of gesturing interfaces and the information conveyed in a single gesture stroke.