Role-play activities have been used for many years to help students engage with abstract content and build understanding in a fun and collaborative way. They are particularly popular in teaching object-oriented programming and concurrency, as it is relatively straightforward for students to take on the role of objects within a software system.

Software testing is typically seen as a dry and uninteresting discipline. There are several reasons for this: it involves many abstract concepts, the process of designing and writing software tests can be quite repetitive, and students struggle to see the value of thorough testing without real-world experience. These challenges create an environment where teaching software testing is particularly challenging compared to other areas of computing. To address this, we designed role-play games with the goal of improving student learning and engagement in a software testing class.

Incluso! is a card game designed for groups of 3–5 players that introduces and explores the concept of universal design in digital products through collaborative play. Its goal is not only to educate but also to cultivate empathy, something that is often underdeveloped in students who are encountering accessible design principles for the first time. The game encourages players to consider real-world barriers that individuals with disabilities face, all within an engaging, conversation-driven format.

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This lab helps students gain experience and proficiency with the agile practice of Mob Programming using Test-Driven Development. Mob Programming involves having an entire team working together to solve one problem at a time. By working closely together, the team shares understanding and enforces quality standards. The Classroom Mob Programming Game involves students in all the formal practices of Mob Programming within a single class or lab session.

The game uses tabletop role-playing game design patterns to produce an authentic learning experience for students. Students earn experience points by practicing the different Mob Programming roles, and new abilities are gained as they level up. This provides scaffolding for their learning: students move from simple to more nuanced practices as they gain levels. These abilities represent legitimate Mob Programming techniques, and so the learning objectives and gameplay are intrinsically linked.

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Iteration is a central to HCI design. The learning objectives of this introductory HCI class activity is to experience and recognize the importance of iteration in the HCI design process, and to practice how small iterative design changes and consistent implementation and evaluation can have on the overall design.

In this class activity, HCI students practice the iterative design process in a rapid and engaging activity. The activity includes three iterations of playing a simple game (tic-tac-toe) in small groups of 2-3 students and changing the rules of the game from one iteration to the next. In the first iteration (baseline), students play the original tic-tac-toe game. Thereafter, in each iteration, students choose and make one change to one rule of the game in its current iteration, play the modified game, and evaluate the impact of the change on the game experience. By the end of the activity, the new game that underwent 3 changes may be substantially different from the original tic-tac-toe game.

This assignment allows students to gain experience with AI game-playing algorithms, implementing minimax and alpha-beta pruningand designing a utility function for measuring game states. The assignment uses Connect Four, a relatively simple fully-observable and deterministic game that students are likely to have seen before. Students are responsible only for developing an agent to play the game; the game itself is already implemented and given as part of the student-facing materials. The assignment breaks down the requirements for the two algorithms into smaller chunks in order to make the whole assignment more approachable. We also provide code for Tic-Tac-Toe so that students can apply their code for minimax and alpha-beta pruning to a simpler game where sub-optimal moves will be more obvious, indicating potential bugs in their implementation. The assignment allows for a tournament to be played among all student submissions, potentially awarding extra credit to the winner of the class tournament.

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These two team-based classroom activities are designed to help students understand key concepts used in artificial intelligence (AI) to search for possible solutions to problems. These activities are designed for use in Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL), where student teams work during class time with active facilitation by an instructor or TA.

After completing these activities, students should be able to:

• Define and give examples of key terms, including: action, state, initial state, goal state, goal test, transition function, path, path cost function, state space
• Define and identify goal state problems and goal path problems.
• Describe the general structure of search problems, and specific strategies, including: breadth-first, depth-first, depth-limited, random-first, bi-directional, best-first
• Describe uninformed and informed search.
• Describe the value of path cost and heuristic functions

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Teaching students how to design and evaluate technology user experiences should be centered around understanding real-world user needs. In this project, students focus on a particular domain, Citizen Science, to motivate their learning of user research, prototyping, and usability testing. Citizen Science projects study phenomena in nature and the environment, such as monitoring the spread of invasive plant species or water quality. Citizen Science projects depend on volunteers to collect and submit data from local environments. Citizen Science is a compelling context for user-centered design because it involves multiple stakeholder groups, various front-end technologies (e.g., web and mobile), and information architecture. This project is scoped for a user-centered design and usability testing course for undergraduate computer science students. The course learning objectives are to (1) use research and design methods to develop an understanding of technology stakeholders and (2) apply that knowledge to create and refine design artifacts.

This user-centered design project invites students to conduct hands-on human-computer interaction research and design by exploring affect-aware technology. These technologies seek to account for users’ emotions, moods, and other affective phenomena in the user experience. Examples include emojis used while texting, social robots that model emotional responses, and emotionally-aware chatbots. This project is for a user-centered design and usability testing course offered to undergraduate computer science students. The course learning objectives are to use research and design methods to (1) build an empirical understanding of technology stakeholders and (2) apply that knowledge to design and evaluate an interactive prototype. By immersing themselves in the complex domain of affect-aware computing, students learn to apply user-centered design to emerging technologies. Students create and refine common user-centered design artifacts, including personas, interaction designs, and prototypes. The reader of this paper will obtain recommendations for structuring the user-centered design projectand a high-level understanding of affect-aware computing.

The Micro:Vote project is designed as an introduction to text- based programming through a 12-week project aimed at 11 to 13 year olds. The project is designed as a School-University partnership whose aim is to highlight the role of creativity and social impact in computing through the design of digital voting posters using the BBC micro:bit and MicroPython.

Adopting a Design Studio approach, the project scaffolds students in the creation of a physical computing voting system and informative poster, to gather responses on an issue of social importance within the community. Through the lens of Human- Computer Interaction, students investigate the role of computing in activism and learn to implement data and control structures.

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The Reuniting Families "unplugged" assignment is designed as a first day CS 1/CS 0 activity to both highlight the social relevance of computing and model what it really means to "do" computer science.

For this activity, the class is asked to consider a disaster, such as an earthquake, devastating a smallish city. Regardless of the specifics of the disaster, the local uncovered soccer stadium is left intact and aid workers have directed all survivors to congregate at this single undamaged stadium. Assume that the stadium is sufficient to hold all the survivors. After all the survivors of a nuclear family have been identified, that family can leave the stadium to their waiting Red Cross tent. Students, working in groups of three or four, devise a protocol, i.e. an algorithm, for the aid workers to use to reunite the survivors of each nuclear family unit.