Category Archives: Teaching

January 6, 2016 · 8:26 pm

Class project videos for “User Experience Design” now online.

I taught the course “User Experience Design” for the second time in Fall 2015 (previously titled “Interaction Design“). In this course, students work with industry clients to create interactive prototypes of design concepts to meet some need of the client’s. Typically this is a new mobile app, enhancements to their existing mobile apps, or some new web feature. We start with user research, go through brainstorming and ideation, wireframing, low-fi and hi-fi prototyping, and think alouds. This semester, we had five great local clients from Gainesville and around Florida: ImmersedGames, ONE.UF, Royal Bank of Canada (Orlando office), Sportody, and Trendy Entertainment.

Check out the final video sketches produced by the 15 student group projects here (shared with permission). Currently this course is offered every fall. The course is in final stages of approval for a course number, so stay tuned!

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May 15, 2015 · 8:39 pm

Videos of student game projects from Spring 2015!

I just posted the final game presentations for students in my Spring 2015 offering of CAP4053 “Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games.” In this class, students learn about game design, game development, user interfaces for games, and how to effectively incorporate AI techniques to make games more fun and challenging to the player.

You can check out the three new video presentations here (shared with permission of the student groups). This course is offered every spring.

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May 15, 2014 · 4:12 pm

Watch student project video demos from “AI for Computer Games” course.

This Spring I co-taught CAP4053 “Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games” with my colleague Doug Dankel. Doug has taught this course for many years and it’s always been a highly popular tech elective for undergraduates in our department. Doug will be retiring this December, and I’ll be taking on the class. We taught two sections with a total of 56 students. The course focuses on game design and development, and culminates with groups of students developing their own game concepts into a playable demo for a showcase at the end of the semester, “Game Day.” You can see more information about the course in the syllabus.

Check out the final presentations of 10 student groups (shared with permission) here. This course is offered every spring.

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January 3, 2014 · 12:19 pm

Watch student video demos from “Natural User Interfaces” course!

This past semester, I taught a course called “Natural User Interfaces” as my first course at the University of Florida. It was supposed to be a small, research-oriented seminar designed to help me recruit PhD students, but the course was going to cover platforms like touch interaction on Android and whole-body interaction on the Microsoft Kinect, so enrollment quickly reached non-seminar numbers! In the end, I had 54 students. The course was a cross-listed graduate and undergraduate special topics course. We covered the latest advances in research on user interactions with these new input modalities, and students worked in groups to prototype an application with a NUI as a central component. They performed user-centered design of an initial version, evaluated it in a user study, and then improved their prototype based on user feedback.

You can see more information about the course here, including the syllabus, assigned readings, my lecture slides, and the assignment overviews. But perhaps the most fun outcome of this course were the 17 NUI projects developed over the course of the semester. You can see the video demos of each of the 15 projects who agreed to let me share their video online here.

Based on the popularity of the course, we have submitted the course for an official number from the University of Florida system, and it will soon get an official UF catalog entry! We anticipate this course may be taught in the future every other fall semester.

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