CPSC 481 Foundations of HCI Saul Greenberg, Instructor

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Notes for Teaching Assistants — Labs 4 & 5

Your fourth lab session

Labs will not be held this week. Instead,

• Grade the assignments and get them back to me by the end of the week so I can check them
• Be available for students who are doing Assignment 2.
• Collect general comments on Assignment 1 (strengths/weaknesses) that you will tell students to follow/avoid for Assignment 2.

Your fifth lab session

Topics covered are:

• Questions on Assignment 1 marking (briefly!)
• Assignment 2 expectations and grading
• Lead a discussion on the system evaluated in Ass2
• Introduce the project
• At end of formal lab, go over individual reports

Assignment 1 marking

• students will likely have questions for you
• tell students overall things you noticed when marking assignments
• • what made write-ups excellent
  • what made write-ups weak
  • where marks were typically lost
• while you should answer high-level questions about marking, defer picky questions (e.g. actual grade) until the end of the formal lab
• I strongly suggest you ask students with complaints over their grading to give in their assignment with a note on it that says exactly where they feel the grading was wrong, and exactly why they should be regraded.
• encourage groups to discuss their assignment 1 reports with you. This is the best way to give feedback!

Assignment 2 expectations/grading

• give out grading sheet
• go over main differences (organization and final section)
• length should be long enough to tell the story! But probably no shorter than 8 pages, no longer than 20.
• Stress:
  report should be oriented toward manager
  must be readable
  must show deep thought
• Refer to lab 3ís notes for details of writeup

System discussion

• have people present their sample tasks, and why they thought they were good (or bad) ones. In particular, did they explore a common thing that users did in the system, or an arcane part of the system? Did the task really matter that much?
• have people discuss their general observations and anecdotal evidence of what happened
• try to elicit some problems of the system, at both the low level (particular examples) and the high level (ie how they generalize)
• try to elicit design changes of the system that use the same technology
• If you have time, have them design a new interface to the system.

Assignment 3 project

• briefly introduce the project(see handout)
• get them ready for first milestone, as below:
• choose project area
  not to ambitious/large
  better to have excellent interface to small system
  implementable
• start exploring many interface ideas with paper/pencil
• present best ones to class as sketches/storyboard/pictive display
• explain other aspects of first milestone