Fall 2015

Interaction Design Research

The course grade is out of 300 points, compromising the following:

• Research project: 155 pts
  Students will complete a quarter-long mini-research project in groups of two. We encourge students to choose projects that are related to their own research or another research project on campus. Leveraging ongoing research increases your speed and ability to find define a good project, and enables you to leverage existing software and hardware infrastructure. The grade for this portion will be broken up as follows:

  • 20 points - Project Abstract Draft

  • 40 points - Project Abstract Final, including research question:
    The strength of the research problem (i.e., do pick something that's research, not just development) and appropriateness of the scope (i.e., don't pick something too large — it's only a 10-week quarter.) Is it executed in ways necessary to understand your research question? (It doesn't need to be functional in ways orthogonal to your research question.)

  • 75 points - Final Report, including execution: Explanation of your ideas, motivation, and related work. How well did you figure out what you set out to learn?

  • 20 points - Final Presentation: In general, both members of the team will receive the same grade. However, if there is a significant contribution disparity, that will be reflected in the grade.

• Paper commentaries: 100 points total (5/reading).
  Students should submit short commentary of each reading using the online submission system (in this format). Commentaries are due by 7:00am the day of class; late commentaries will not be accepted. Students are required to do all the readings, but are only required to submit a commentary for those marked on the syllabus.

  We will ignore the four lowest-scoring commentaries while grading you. This implies each student may opt to pass on four commentaries for any reason (personal or family matters, conflicting deadlines, etc.); there are no exemptions beyond this. This limit is for the number of commentaries you miss-- if you skip a day that requires two commentaries, you will miss two commentaries. These exempted commentaries should be specifically noted as being passed on. Commentaries will be graded on a check-plus/check/check-minus scale.

• (Co-)leading one class discussion: 30 pts
  For details on how to structure a discussion, go here. On their discussion day, students should submit their materials instead of their commentary using the online submission system. In evaluating your discussion, the course staff will ask the following questions:

  • Did you effectively extract the high-level points from readings and present them?
  • Did you raise interesting and difficult questions about the readings?
  • Did you clearly review, describe, and summarize the paper's main technical contributions? If there is an important algorithm, you should explain how it works. If there are statistics, you should explain how any why they were produced.
  • Did the discussion accomplish valuable learning goals for the students? (i.e., did understand something about the readings at the end of class that may not have at the beginning.)
  • Did you engage the students in discussion?
  • Did you incorporate students' ideas from their commentaries into the discussion?
  • This is how your grade out of 30 is determined:

    Weak (0-16)	Proficient (17-25)	Mastery (26-30)
    Yes to few of the questions above	Yes to most but not all of the questions above	Yes to all of the questions above

• General participation: 20 points
  
  • Needs Work (0-10): one or more of: uneven attendance, not engaged, on email/Facebook/Web, little active participation, comments only tangentially related to discussion topic, never attends office hours.
  • Satisfactory (10-15): participates actively in small group and full-class discussions.
  • Excellent (15-20): one or more of: Participation regularly adds new insights to class (without being a blowhard); connects class topics with outside research; builds theory and insights; careful scholarly discussion of readings (comments engage with the technical meat, not just the surface features); participation and enthusiasm create esprit de corps with peers.

Human Subjects Certification

5pt Extra Credit Assignment

In order to ever submit your work to a conference or journal, you need IRB approval prior to gathering any human subjects data. The UCSD IRB approves most HCI research as exempt. Exempt approval is a quick and lightweight processs.

To be certified as a researcher that can submit IRB, the first step is to pass the training tutorial. This is really useful information, and because we strongly encourage you to get certified even if you don't plan to publish your work, we'll provide extra credit to any students who send us their certitication. This UCSD IRB page describes how to do so.
The training modules are linked from the CITI site.