Introduction to the Special Issue on HRI Education
We are happy to present this Special Issue on Education in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) to the community. As HRI has matured as a field, it is also becoming an increasingly popular educational topic and resource at all levels of instruction, from elementary through graduate programs. While several excellent review articles for the field exist, there is no textbook or recognized curriculum in HRI. The interdisciplinary nature of the field presents students and instructors with opportunities for building on diverse perspectives from design, engineering, computer science, and the social sciences and humanities, as well as challenges in presenting and working with material from such a broad array of disciplines. The authors in this special issue discuss their experiences with and strategies for designing HRI curricula and teaching HRI to students of diverse backgrounds and skill sets. We hope this special issue will inspire many more courses, summer schools, and educational outreach activities in HRI. We also hope that it sparks more discussions about diverse approaches to and necessary standards for HRI curricula.