Abstract:

This paper deals with the author's experience with students in UX design course. This course is part of the bachelor curriculum in Computer Science. Students are digital natives as Prensky defines the people born in the last 25-30 years. These students were born with a lot of devices around them. Work with applications is their daily life: searching, installing, executing. The goal of the course is to follow the steps of application design. It is a long process from understanding the potential users' needs, designing the functionality, going deeper into the process of application creation with the use of cases or UML diagrams and at the end to develop a prototype together with an evaluation strategy.
Different learning approaches are applied during the last 10 years in such a course (at 60 students per year).

The most helpful way for students is to work in teams and to follow the steps of the creating process together with their teacher/mentor and to discuss them in seminars. The teams are formed between 2 and 4 students. They have assigned roles in the team. This is one of the tasks and a goal to train teamwork skills. The teams are formed based on students' personality.

Putting students in others’ shoes is crucial for their understanding especially when the application is designed for people who are not so advanced in IT. In a face-to-face meeting, students work in teams. The second difficult step in designing applications is planning the evaluation process. Some of the students work for IT companies as testers but even this experience does not help them enough.

It is very helpful to hold seminars where one team is in focus and the other students play active role asking questions and providing examples or experience to support their questions. There is no pure audience everyone can be part of the designing and working process. The role of the teacher is just to mentor students in order to drive them to generate the best ideas. Ultimately this process brings satisfaction and motivation of the students and their teacher.

Acknowledgment:
This research was supported by the Bulgarian National Scientific Fund through the project “Conceptual Modeling and Simulation of Internet of Things Ecosystems (KoMEIN), contract No. 02/1 / 13.12.2016.

Keywords:

UX design course, training, mentoring .