NSF Award
0203323
0203323<br/>Nancy Kaplan<br/>University of Baltimore<br/>Baltimore, MD<br/> "An HCI Partnership Serving Underrepresented Groups"<br/><br/>This is a multinstitutional project that leverages prior and ongoing research in the area of Human Computer Interfaces (HCI) into new curricula. In particular, the project's focus is: (a) to create a Human-Computer Interaction curriculum at the University of Baltimore's School of Information Arts and Technologies (SIAT) that will actively involve early-stage graduate students in ongoing research; (b) to construct and deliver this curriculum so that it is maximally effective in attracting and graduating students from groups underrepresented in the sciences, especially women, African-Americans, and students from non-traditional age groups; (c) to structure this curriculum around the results, and ongoing inquiry, of research at the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) in the design of children's technologies; (d) to embed this curriculum and research in a partnership spanning SIAT, HCIL, and local private and public sector institutions, and (e) widely disseminate this partnership model, and the results of its evaluation, with the goal of creating further partnerships between research and comprehensive institutions that will result in the involvement of students from underrepresented groups in ongoing research. Students who participate in this project's curriculum will also engage in field research that prepare them to join the workforce as professionals who have experience with research-grounded methods of developing HCI technologies, particularly those that are components of the HCIL's work on children's educational information technologies (including contextual inquiry, task analysis, participatory design, low-fidelity prototyping, querying interfaces, and spatial interfaces).
