This week, I expected to be presenting my first first-author CHI paper at #chi2020. That didn't happen, so instead I'll hit the highlights here!
"Computing Students' Learning Difficulties in HCI Education" : A thread (1/13)
"Computing Students' Learning Difficulties in HCI Education" : A thread (1/13)
(2/13) Motivation: We know HCI design is hard to teach and hard to learn, but it's important for CS students to know so they can make good software. Having a somewhat comprehensive list of learning difficulties faced by students can help educators know what to look out for.
(3/13) RQ: What difficulties do computing students face when learning and applying software interface design skills?
(4/13) Method-1: Surveys asking CS students in formal intro HCI design classes to self-report confusions about design topics (n=117, 2 NA unis). Interviews with CS students formally/informally learning HCI design about experiences (n=15).
(5/13) Method-2: Surveys (n=35) + follow up interviews (n=8) with HCI educators who teach design to computing students, exploring (1) whether they'd encountered students' reported challenges in their classes (2) what other difficulties they saw that students didn't identify.
(6/13) Method-3: Collaborative qualitative analysis on all the above. Affinity diagramming for initial types of learning difficulty, followed by full iterative qualitative coding.
(7/13) Results-1: We found at least 18 distinct types of learning difficulties computing students could face in introductory HCI design classes. 15 from students' responses + 3 from educators. (Same properly tagged accessible table can be found on pg 10, Table 4 in the paper!) 
(8/13) Results-2: Major categories of difficulty included (1) Mechanics of design work (2) Project management + teamwork skills (3) Wickedness of design problems w/ unclear defn's and no inherently correct answers (4) Distorted perspectives on what design was or what it entailed.
(9/13) Implications: Lots of open RQs! Do these generalize to K-12, comm. college? Strategies to mitigate these barriers? And how does prior knowledge interact w/ design learning? (Our results suggest the way we teach computing in higher ed can make learning design harder :) )
(10/13) The full paper "Computing Students' Learning Difficulties in HCI Education" w/ descriptions and examples of each learning difficulty can be found at the ACM DL or my site (chk profile). Shout out to my awesome collaborators @amyjko @merons_
dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.114…
dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.114…
(11/13) I expanded on this paper to give actionable, practitioner-oriented tips for teaching HCI design to computing students in my article "Seven tips to improve HCI education" : medium.com/bits-and-behav…
(12/13) This all builds toward a goal of developing robust HCI pedagogical content knowledge, which @amyjko and I expand upon in this @HCI_Education EduCHI workshop "Unsolved Challenge" paper: educhi2020.hcilivingcurriculum.org/wp-content/upl…
(13/13) I'm currently evaluating an educational intervention grounded in these results which should help students design more inclusive/accessible HCI artifacts! Feel free to reach out w/ any questions/comments or just to nerd out about HCI edu with me.
