Onboarding new talent to Child–Computer Interaction research: Teaching a tasting menu of CCI as an elective research subject

We present a case study in which we seek to investigate what motivates interaction design students to take a small elective course in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) and what we can offer as a ‘tasting menu’, a small sample of emerging research specialties, to awaken their interest for CCI. The study clarifies what motivated students to take the elective course and what their learning expectations were before the start of the course. We then prototyped and piloted a research-based ‘tasting menu’ type of course and conducted a formative and summative evaluation with the students. The contribution of this paper is a set of recommendations for onboarding new talent to the research field by teaching CCI in a modular fashion to interaction design students, based on students’ and teachers’ experiences.