User-centered thinking is no typical strength of many students, and especially often of tech-savvy computer science students. We propose a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) introductory course as a highly suitable opportunity to foster these important skills. It naturally incorporates technological challenges with user-centered design. After an initial overview of Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) and HRI techniques, our course focuses on scenario-based design of social robot projects, and mutual bechmarking of robot behavior and performance. Participants outline, implement and present everyday scenarios using Pepper robots. In order to emphasize user-centered aspects over programming tasks we use an open-source visual programming tool. We observed significant improvement of user-centric awareness among participating students and the ability to apply this knowledge in a broader sense.