This class, as I teach it, is about discovering your individual creativity. I believe that every student has an inner creativity and my goal in this class is to help them explore the best ways to activate their creative self. We consume media from a wide variety of sources from InGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity by Tina Seelig to listening to episodes of 99% Invisible. Assignments include building a fort or tower, playing Pictionary, trying something you might be bad at, and building your observation skills.

When I teach this class, I teach it as a project based version of UX 1400. I took a number of ideas from Evan Peck at Bucknell but focused on the design and process of UX instead of the programming aspects. My goal was to ensure that the Software Engineering students had a solid background in high level UX concepts so that they could communicate with UXers or dig into topics relevant to them more deeply. This has not been taught since Winter 2020/2021.

This class is designed to introduce students to the design thinking process. Since it currently meets a general education requirement there are students from a wide variety of majors, mostly within engineering. My goal is to help them think as far outside the box as possible. Their initial ideas should be blue sky ideas, things that aren't necessarily even achievable with the hardware or resources they have today. I try to provide students with at least two major projects. One is a group based project, ideally working with a local organization. The other is an individual project, ideally something fun. In Spring 2022 their group project was to design better systems for Children's Hospital trauma thoracotomies. In contrast, their individual project was to make a fun puzzle for college students.

This course was first taught in Spring 2021. I came up with the idea working with Dr. Walt Schilling in Software Engineering. This course is a mix of psychology, sociology, and practical skills. We discuss a wide range of cybercrimes from identity theft to infrastructure destruction. Students get a chance to do a deeper dive on topics they are interested in through two projects. One is a book report where they chose a non-fiction book from a list of 8 ranging from classics like The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll to newer books like Countdown to Zero Day by Kim Zetter. They also are responsible, in a group, for teaching the class about one type of cybercrime, again allowing them to learn more to engage their classmates.

This class is taught by a number of professors in the program and is designed as an overview of the UX major. While it's required by the CS program for sophomores, it is also needed for the UX minor and a number of students across campus chose to take it. The goal is to introduce students, in ten weeks, to the wide range of sub disciplines within UX and to get them comfortable with the basics so that in future classes they can delve deeper. Individuals create a resume and a portfolio website and as a group students do a mini-design thinking sprint. These basic skills ensure that any student who performs well in the class is able to show those skills to employers as they continue their educational journey.

This course was designed for sophomore honors students and was a precusor to SS 3630: Design Thinking. The primary difference was that this course tended to have much smaller enrollments and, due to the honors program theme, was very much centered around places/spaces instead of more open ended design thinking problems. This has not been taught since Winter 2020/2021.

This course covers accessibility and internationalization, but also spends some time focused on biases to help students recognize internal forces that may be impacting their designs without them realizing it. While several projects are in flux, students create an accessibility report for a website and write a cultural analysis on a app/product/website/system/location of their choosing. Our course materials are centered around #OwnVoices materials as much as possible to help students learn from disabled people and people from around the world.

My goal in this course is to ensure that students have deep understanding of two methods (usability testing and surveys) while also introducing a number of other methods on a more surface level. While students won't complete this class having a deep understanding of how to run a focus group or participatory design session, they will have the resources to help them evaluate which method is best and how to learn more about that method. Traditionally I've run the usability testing project in groups and the survey project individually.

This course was introduced in Winter 2021/2022 as a chance for students to dive more deeply into research methods. As with User Research I, we dive more deeply into one method, in this case foundational or generative research. This is due to the fact that this can be one of the most powerful methods for research but one that is the most daunting for new grads. In addition, we spend a week on each of about six additional methods. For some of these we're going into more depth on a topic from User Research I, such as survey analysis, and for others we're introducing new topics. Each week we have a workshop day which allows them to apply the methods they've learned that week. This gives them hands on experience with creating scripts, conducting analysis, and the user side of the experience.

This class is also a new class, first introduced in Winter 2021/2022. The focus on data visualization is seemingly narrow, but as one digs in, data viz could easily be a whole degree unto itself. For this course I pull together a wide range of resources including textbooks, podcasts, and data sites to allow students to think more deeply about data and data visualization as well as to actually delve into creating their own data visualizations. This course is not focused on programming, although programatically cleaning a data set may be useful. Instead the focus is on using existing tools such as Excel, Sheets, Tableau, Illustrator, etc. to help tell the story that the data is telling.

This course will be taught for the first time in the 2022/2023 school year. We'll have teams of 3-4 students working together for the entire academic year on some large user experience problems from local non-profits. I'll report back afterwards.