An HCI Approach to Computing in the Real World SARITA YARDI, PAMELA KROLIKOWSKI, TANESHIA MARSHALL, and AMY BRUCKMAN Georgia Institute of Technology We describe the implementation of a six-week course to teach Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to high school students. Our goal was to explore the potential of HCI in motivating students to pursue future studies in related computing fields. Participants in our course learned to make con- nections between the types of technology they use in their daily lives and the design processes that went into creating these technologies. We suggest that by portraying computing through the lens of HCI, as an innovative, creative, and challenging field with authentic, real-world applications, we may be able to motivate students to become more interested in computing. Categories and Subject Descriptors: K.3.2 [Computers and Information Science Education]: Computer Science Education—Curriculum; Computer Science Education General Terms: Design; Experimentation Additional Key Words and Phrases: Human-computer interaction, broadening participation in computing, education, motivation, K-12 curriculum ACM Reference Format: Yardi, S., Krolikowski, P., Marshall, T., and Bruckman, A. 2008. An HCI approach to computing in the real world. ACM J. Educ. Resour. Comput. 8, 3, Article 9 (October 2008), 20 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1404935.1404938. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1404935.1404938. 1. INTRODUCTION “You can actually make up a new technology or something or you can design stuff and improve it ... I like that we can have ideas that we might some day see them as real.” (Tim, 13) 1 In the fall of 2006 and the spring of 2007 we interviewed 13 teenagers from local schools and observed over 40 teenagers in after-school technology pro- grams, ranging in age from 11-19, to learn about their perceptions of comput- ing [Yardi and Bruckman 2007]. They told us that they love to hang out online, stating that they “check Facebook and chat on IM on the computer all day long” 1 Name changed to maintain anonymity. Author’s address: S. Yardi, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 85 5th Street NW, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0760; email: yardi@cc.gatech.edu. Permission to make digital/hard copy of all or part of this material without fee for personal or classroom use provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advan- tage, the ACM copyright/server notice, the title of the publication, and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from the Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. c  2008 ACM 1531-4278/2008/10-ART9 $5.00 DOI: 10.1145/1404935.1404938. http://doi.acm.org/ 10.1145/1404935.1404938. ACM Journal on Educational Resources in Computing, Vol. 8, No. 3, Article 9, Pub. date: October 2008.