Crafting a delightful experience: teaching interaction design to teens

about design in ninth grade, during their first year in high school. As members of Project: Interaction, a 10-week high school after-school program in Brooklyn, New York, they are introduced to the practice of interaction design. They learn how experiences with technology, people, and things are researched, prototyped, and designed. And at the end of the program, they create a finished interaction design project borne of their own ideas. Before we founded Project: Interaction, we were classmates at the School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design program. We immediately connected through the idea that practicing and thinking about design can be a significant catalyst in young people's development as students and later as professionals, regardless of their chosen career path. We also believe that students who learn interaction design will be able to apply the same thinking strategies in their other course work, stretching the limits of their abilities to learn and create new ideas. When we started talking to educators about our thinking, we learned that many students don't have time in their schedules for an art or design class, and most schools don't have the resources to facilitate one. It was easy for us to see the need for design education in schools, and we began to wonder if interaction design could be a creative complement to a student's standard high school curriculum. To us, that need was a design problem. Designing the Experience We began shaping our project with the goal of understanding what high school is like from the perspective of students, parents, and teachers. We visited high schools, conducting observations and interviews to help inform how we could develop an interaction design curriculum and gain the high school administration's support to teach it. From our research, we knew that students would need to be intrinsi-cally motivated to become actively engaged in class. High school students want to connect to the material and to each other. We designed Project: Interaction as an after-school program that teaches high school students how to use design to change their communities. Connecting the students to their community—inside the school and outside of it—made the program and the concepts we wanted to teach tangible in a way that was not possible via design books. Approaching the design of Project: Interaction as an interaction design problem allowed us to focus every aspect of the experience on our users—high school students. And …