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

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.