Washington State University has been selected as one of 40 colleges and universities nationwide to receive the 2006 HP Technology for Teaching grant, designed to transform and improve learning in the classroom through innovative uses of technology.
Awarded to the WSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the grant will provide an award package of Hewlett-Packard (HP) products and a faculty stipend valued at more than $69,000.
Grant projects through this program will impact more than 4,000 students during the 2006-07 academic year. Each of the HP Technology for Teaching grant recipients will use HP wireless Tablet PC technology to enhance learning in engineering, math, science, computer science or business courses.
Chris Hundhausen, WSU assistant professor, was awarded the grant in response to a proposal entitled “Using HP Mobile Technology to Support a Human-Computer Interaction Design Studio,” which was inspired by the design studio commonly used in architecture education.
The project will explore a “studio-based” approach to teaching an undergraduate course on human-computer interaction design. In addition to a weekly lecture, the course will revolve around a weekly, 150-minute “design studio” that emphasizes conceptual user interface design activities.
“Using wireless HP tablet PCs, pairs of students will interact with custom, sketch-based software to construct low fidelity design prototypes that meet the requirements of given design problems,” said Hundhausen. “Each design problem will focus on the development of an interface to a specific electronic device, such as a VCR, or software system, and require students to apply the design processes and principles currently being explored in class.”
The 2006 HP Technology for Teaching grant program is awarding grants totaling more than $7 million to 130 K-12 public schools and 40 two- and four-year colleges and universities in the United States and Puerto Rico. From 2004 to 2006, HP has committed $36 million in Technology for Teaching grants to more than 650 schools worldwide to support HP’s broader education goal of transforming teaching and learning through the integration of technology.
