Semester Projects on Human-Computer Interaction as Service and Outreach: Undergraduate and Graduate

We present an approach for using class projects in undergraduate and graduate human-computer interaction (HCI) classes to have social and economic impact. Class projects can help teaching by being more motivating to students, help students and instructors in their careers, be more interesting to the instructor, and have more impact to society and academia. We provide two example project descriptions used at Penn State’s College of IST since 2000, suggestions for how to teach project-based HCI courses, and example projects that have suggested useful interface changes to the websites of a variety of government, non-profit, university, and small-to-medium-sized businesses, as well as publishable and published graduate projects. These reports fulfill a pedagogical goal by having students demonstrate mastery of the material, particularly evidence- and theory-based changes to improve the usability of websites. The reports provide (in the best cases) strong, correct suggestions for improving the usability of these websites or extend the method, practice, and application of HCI methods. The use of these reports also helps reduce plagiarism because the sites and thus work are unique.