Looking for the Human in HRI Teaching: User-Centered Course Design for Tech-Savvy Students
Tobias Doernbach
TL;DR
The paper addresses how to inculcate user-centered thinking in tech-savvy computer science students within Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) education. It presents an introductory HRI course at Ostfalia University that combines Scenario-Based Design, Pepper robotics, and a Node-RED-based visual programming tool across three components: theoretical content, research-paper presentations, and hands-on lab scenarios. Innovative elements include a proposal-fair group formation process, staged individual and group proposals, mandatory user studies, and an Open Lab Day for dissemination, plus reflective use of Generative AI. Findings indicate participants gain topic comprehension and enhanced user-centered thinking, though challenges remain in areas like emotion integration and time/discipline constraints, supporting potential adoption and scaling of this pedagogy in HRI education.
Abstract
Top-down, user-centered thinking is not typically a strength of all students, especially tech-savvy computer science-related ones. We propose Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) introductory courses as a highly suitable opportunity to foster these important skills since the HRI discipline includes a focus on humans as users. Our HRI course therefore contains elements like scenario-based design of laboratory projects, discussing and merging ideas and other self-empowerment techniques. Participants describe, implement and present everyday scenarios using Pepper robots and our customized open-source visual programming tool. We observe that students obtain a good grasp of the taught topics and improve their user-centered thinking skills.