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FORUM HCI EDUCATION

teach these workshops and to serve as role models for the younger students.

THE HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN CHARRETTE

The charrette gives K– 12 students hands-on experience with activities and methodologies commonly used in the human-centered design discipline. Students are given a design challenge, such as developing a citizen-science application. In one charrette conducted in a coastal town, they were asked to create an app that allows a person in their community to collect information that helps scientists learn something about a topic. Students brainstormed about potential users and chose one as a target client. In this case, students chose to design an app for local fishermen. They identified the fishermen’s needs, which at the time were concerned with a declining salmon population. The students drew storyboards with the scenario describing how the fishermen would use the app: to help scientists track salmon-migration patterns and understand where the fish are (or aren’t). They created interaction flows highlighting the structure of the app (Figure 1), sketched screen interfaces, and developed an interactive prototype of the app using the Marvel software tool (Figure 2). At the end of the workshop, the students demonstrated their prototypes for this salmon-tracking app. We found that design challenges such as citizen science are effective at creating engagement throughout the design process for students in both middle and high schools in a variety of courses.

I was taught as a young child that you lift as you climb, meaning you pull someone with you and assist them…

— Layla Ibrahim, HCDE senior

The Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) department at the University of Washington (U W) organizes a variety of K– 12 outreach activities [ 1], including workshops for design thinking, user research, and prototyping. The outreach program raises awareness about the field of human-centered design for young learners. These activities are fast-paced, take a hands-on approach, and are customized for each group of student participants. In this article, we present an approach for introducing human-centered design to K– 12 students by empowering undergraduate students to develop and teach these outreach workshops.

A large number of our undergraduate students elect to participate in our outreach program each year. We have worked with thousands of K– 12 students in the state of Washington, in a variety of settings, urban, suburban, rural, and tribal, in diverse public and private schools. We have also participated in events organized on the U W campus by groups such as the College of Engineering (Engineering Discovery Days), Society for Women Engineers, Women in Science and Engineering ( WiSE), and the National Society of Black Engineers.

To introduce K– 12 students to
the field of human-centered design
(and more generally to STEM
disciplines), HCDE students develop
and lead a workshop curriculum, the
human-centered design charrette.
In the charrette, K– 12 students
learn to design a website or a mobile
application while keeping the users of
the technology at the forefront of their
thinking and making.
Here, we discuss how HCDE
students take a human-centered
approach to doing outreach. They
design charrette workshops that fit
the needs and interests of the target
students by engaging teachers in
co-designing the activities. We also
discuss the different ways in which
we adapt the workshop curriculum to
the interests of the students who will
get to experience it, as well as to their
classroom setting. We describe how
we scaffold educational experiences
for service learning that empower
undergraduate students to design and

Elena Agapie and Andrew Davidson, University of Washington
Human-Centered
Design Charrettes
for K– 12 Outreach

Insights
→ Hands-on, human-centered
design workshops are
effective for outreach, helping
motivate K– 12 students to
pursue STEM fields.

→ Empowering undergraduate students to lead charrettes in service-learning study opportunities allows them to serve as mentors and role models.

→ Co-designing workshops with K– 12 teachers allows the customization of workshops to make them relevant and engaging.