Rethinking HCI education

Abstract

ing) leads to new or modified concepts. The challenge is to create learning environments that are complex enough to lead to unexpected experiences, but not too complex to be inaccessible to students. • Unguided or minimally guided experience and reflection is not effective [7]. We must provide a structure and a set of plans that support the development of informed exploration and reflective inquiry without taking initiative or control away from students. • We need to create a personally meaningful context for students. For a problem to foster the learning of powerful computing ideas, the students must accept it as their problem. We need to take noncontextualized computing ideas and embed them in a meaningful context for student investigation. Our framework supports these principles with a collection of software tools, conceptual frameworks, and guidelines, which we classify into two groups (Figure 2): • tools that facilitate the creation of useful experiences for exploring advanced computing technology, and • tools that guide and support reflection on such experiences. Creating experience. The key element of our approach is empowering students to have relevant experiences with advanced computational technologies, because without such experiences, the students do not have a basis to reflect and learn. To support this goal, our framework includes: detailed description of the tool is