HCI Support Card: Creating and Using a Support Card for Education in Human-Computer Interaction

Support cards summarise a set of core information about a subject. The periodic table of chemical elements and the mathematical tables are well-known examples of support cards for didactic purposes. Technology professionals also use support cards for recalling information such as syntactic details of programming languages or harmonic colour palettes for designing user interfaces. While support cards have proved useful in many contexts, little is known about its didactic use in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field. To fill this gap, this study proposes and evaluates a process for creating and using an HCI support card. The process considers the interdisciplinary nature of the field, covering the syllabus, curriculum, textbooks, and students' perception about HCI topics. The evaluation is based on case studies of creating and using a card during a semester in two undergraduate courses: Software Engineering and Information Systems. Results show that a support card can help students in following the lessons, remembering and integrating the different topics studied in the classroom. The card guides the students in building their cognitive maps, mind maps, and concept maps to study human-computer interaction. It fosters students' curiosity and permanent engagement with the HCI topics. The card usefulness goes beyond the HCI classroom, being also used by students in their professional activities and other academic disciplines, fostering an interdisciplinary application of HCI topics.