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Looking for the Human in HRI Teaching: User-Centered Course Design for Tech-Savvy Students

Robotics 2024-03-20 v1 Human-Computer Interaction

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.12607,
  title  = {Looking for the Human in HRI Teaching: User-Centered Course Design for Tech-Savvy Students},
  author = {Tobias Doernbach},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.12607},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Presented at the Designing an Intro to HRI Course Workshop at HRI 2024 (arXiv:2403.05588)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:25:32.951Z