I must say the results were a hard blow. The comments were even harder to take, especially since most of the class are also my peers. The main issues were that it was difficult to know what the course was about, that there should have been a greater emphasis on the tools, and some people felt I wasn’t knowledgeable enough about the material (though others complained that they felt they could have learned more from me).

While not the feedback anyone wants to hear, I understand their frustration. The course is not clearly defined, which was my main concern when planning it. There was a big question about whether the course was about the tools or prototyping design ideas. I questioned why a Flash tools course was required for graduate interaction design students, since many of them already have the skills. Through discussion with other faculty, it was decided the course needed to change from strictly a Flash course, which meant I needed to develop the syllabus from scratch. The school did not help me prepare for this. Other than the meetings I initiated about what I should teach, I was on my own.

This is the norm for graduates students who teach, which is not good for the teachers or the students. And as I stated at the beginning of the course, I did feel unprepared. While I attempted to stick to talking about design concepts within the context of digital prototypes, I was constantly pulled toward more detailed teaching about the tools due to some of the needs of the students. This created a question in my mind about what the course should really be about, which probably didn’t help things.

This is all not to say that I could not have done things better. Definitely, I could have. My idea of keeping the syllabus flexible to respond to the student needs seemed to have worked against me. And I should have learned more about the differences between ActionScript 2.o and 3.0, as it took me a couple weeks to figure it out.

On the positive side, I had an open conversation about the course during the final, and several of the students said they learned a lot and enjoyed certain projects (while others thought certain projects were useless). As for the evaluations, a few students gave me an above average score. And some comments were positive. So not all bad.

I shared the verbal feedback I got with other faculty and hope it will affect the future of the course. For one, I stressed the difficulty of having a graduate student teach his peers, and the odd role dynamic that it creates. I also highlighted the need for the content to be more defined and questioned whether it should be a required course for interaction design graduate students.

The feedback really made me think hard about preparing for the Basic Interaction class I’m teaching this semester. Again, I was on my own. But fortunately this time I had four previous syllabi to pull from, I have taken the class, and it’s my degree, so it was a lot easier to plan. I’m a lot more confident and prepared this time around.

Overall, I still believe my teaching experience last semester was valuable, and I’m happy I was able to help some of the students learn new skills. I’m disappointed that this wasn’t the case for everyone, and I wish it would have gone more smoothly. But I think the experience and the feedback will help me both this semester and in the future.

I struggled over what was more important to teach, Flash or prototyping with Flash. In trying to get everyone quickly up to speed to complete the semester’s assignments, I took a few too many detours into the coding aspects of Flash, and veered away from more interesting topics, like what are effective digital prototypes.

We started with a simple motion project whereby an emotion needed to be conveyed using a single black dot. That broke students into basic animation techniques while allowing us to also talk about the behavior of the animation.

The second project was a control redesign. Students were asked to find a single analog control and redesign it using Flash as the tool. This project yielded many questions from those unfamiliar with Flash. And while everyone successfully completed the project, the questions led me to pursue more instruction on Flash itself instead of the hybrid Flash/interaction design course I imagined.

Fortunately, I recognized this shift, with the help of insightful feedback from several of the students, worked back to my original intention. The third project combined necessary Flash skills for prototyping with a larger focus on communication and interaction. The submitted projects and the conversations around then were promising.

Those first three projects were warm-ups for the three larger projects, one of which began a few weeks ago and will finish up tomorrow. I thought it was important for students to learn about video sketching and spend focused time on creating them outside of their other design projects, where video sketching would only be a part.

I had the students propose a product or service and create a scenario of use that would be the basis of the video sketch. The lack of constraints may have been an issue for some. So I would maybe rethink that for future projects. But otherwise I’m really pleased with the work in progress and the conversations we’ve had surrounding the work. I’m hoping the focus now will mean better decision making for them later during crunch time in their other classes.

Next week we will start a mobile interface project. The final project will focus on emotion and play (or harm) for engagement or entertainment using a virtual pet as a starting point. This was also going to offer an opportunity to introduce object oriented programming, but I’m having second thoughts. I began the course with the idea that there are few ActionScript details one must know to prototype in Flash as an interaction designer. Object oriented programming isn’t really one of them. To add more fodder to my thoughts, tonight I stumbled upon Robert Reimann’s So You Want To Be An Interaction Designer, in which he says:

Designers seldom code—if you are attached to programming, all power to you: the world needs more design-sensitive programmers. But unless you have complete control over your projects, you will be short-changing your users by trying to design and develop at the same time—it’s a conflict of interest. So, if you can’t stomach the thought of abandoning programming, interaction design may not be for you.

So I will likely abandon the more programmy aspect of the final project, and instead focus on interaction. The students have a good handle on the tools already. What’s more important, at least as designers, is how they use them.

But it was harder than I thought it would be. My throat got dry and we’re not allowed to have any drinks in the computer lab. And my introduction and presentation went a lot quicker than I thought.

The class has 16 people registered, but about 30 people showed up. I scared a couple away with my overview, but eight or so still talked to me after class about getting in. I’m capping it at 20.

While I had a syllabus, the projects and the time line is vague. So I need to clearly define what the projects will be. And I need to do this soon, as I plan to give the first assignment on Thursday.

For the first part of the course, I’m having them do rapid prototyping focusing on the elements of interaction defined by Dan Saffer in Designing for Interaction. But I need to figure out exactly what those mini projects will be, which I realized for sure when confronted by 30 sets of inquisitive eyes.

Here’s the current syllabus, which will likely change over the next day or two. I need to combine or eliminate some of the projects. And, like I said, clearly determine what each will entail.

Design Computing will focus on prototyping interactions, interfaces, and experiences as a designer. We will start with simple, low fidelity prototypes and work our way toward higher fidelity. Also, we will explore ways to communicate experiences for design concepts.

Flash will be the core tool for prototyping, but other options will also be considered, including AfterEffects and Processing. By the end of the course, you should feel comfortable working with Flash as a prototyping tool. This course, however, is not about learning how to program or about making you a Flash expert.

In evaluating the work we do in this class, we will focus on
behavior and experience. Projects and conversation will also focus on the elements of interaction: motion, space, time, appearance,
texture, and sound.

We will also explore how to encourage play through interaction and understanding the role of emotion in digital prototyping.

In addition, throughout the course we will create a web portfolio using a combination of HTML and Flash.

Key Takeaways

• Rapid prototyping
• Communicating and experience with ditigal tools
• Comfortable prototyping in Flash
• Basic knowledge of creating a website

Projects

• Motion, space, time, appearance, texture, sound
• Mobile interface
• Video prototyping
• Physical prototyping
• Website/portfolio
• Play and emotion

I can’t say I gave it too much thought when I accepted the position, but with course registration beginning tomorrow, and with a few students contacting me to get more information, it’s more of a reality. And I must say I’m pretty excited to have my own gig and to be able to share my knowledge with people to help them get through their assignments here at CMU and beyond. Should be a good experience.

I was too tired from my soccer game to pull an all-nighter. And I made the final tweaks about 15 minutes before class. I prefer to think of it as using all the time given, rather than procrastination.

I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢d post it but the SWF file is 13 MB. To ensure the sound synced up I exported it as a Quicktime movie, which bumped the size up to over 250 MB. This was quite a change from the lean Flash applications I typically build for web use.

The song I used in the movie is still echoing in the chambers of my mind.