Top-down, user-centered thinking is not typically a strength of all students, especially tech-savvy computer science-related ones. We propose Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) introductory courses as a highly suitable opportunity to foster these important skills since the HRI discipline includes a focus on humans as users. Our HRI course therefore contains elements like scenario-based design of laboratory projects, discussing and merging ideas and other self-empowerment techniques. Participants describe, implement and present everyday scenarios using Pepper robots and our customized open-source visual programming tool. We observe that students obtain a good grasp of the taught topics and improve their user-centered thinking skills.

翻译：自上而下的用户中心思维通常并非所有学生的强项，尤其是那些精通技术的计算机科学相关专业学生。我们提出，人机交互（HRI）入门课程是培养这些重要技能的绝佳机会，因为HRI学科本身就包含对作为用户的人类的关注。因此，我们的HRI课程包含了诸如基于情景的实验室项目设计、讨论与整合想法，以及其他自我赋能技巧等元素。学生利用Pepper机器人和我们定制的开源可视化编程工具，描述、实现并展示日常情景。我们观察到，学生能够很好地掌握所教授的主题，并提升了他们的用户中心思维能力。