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Kean CS Lab

Program 06 / 06

HCI, XR & Computing Education

Who gets to use the system — and who gets to become the person who builds the next one?

Morreale’s HCI, software engineering, and CS-education research is a departmental signature, including public work on inclusive design across the undergraduate curriculum, transfer-student sociotechnical experience, and broadening participation. Ma and Subramanian add XR. This is not ‘soft’ CS. It is empirical, instrumented, and publishable in CHI, SIGCSE, and HCI venues.

Questions the work is for

  1. 01

    What does inclusive design look like as a required practice, not an elective sermon?

  2. 02

    How do transfer and first-generation students actually experience university software?

  3. 03

    When is XR a better interface — and when is it a more expensive mouse?

Methods, data, benchmarks

method

HCI study design

Controlled studies, field studies, and mixed methods. Pre-register when you can; report when you cannot. The method section is the contribution.

method

Curriculum as experiment

Public papers on embedding equitable design and assessing learning outcomes (including a SIGCSE 2024 pilot with Ojeda, Morreale, and Kwak). Treat the course as a system under test.

tooling

XR prototypes

Unity/Unreal or web-XR artifacts with defined tasks, not demos. Latency and cybersickness are data.

dataset

Sociotechnical corpora

Interview, interaction, and log data from real institutional systems — collected with consent and analyzed with a named theory, not a vibe.

Taxonomy on this page: method, dataset, benchmark, tooling. Field-standard methods are named as such; they are not automatic claims of a Kean dataset release.

Doctoral tracks

Inclusive & equitable design

Morreale’s collaborations (including work with Burnett and others on inclusive design in the CS curriculum) give incoming students a literature and a local practice to extend.

Institutional interfaces

The CHI-facing work on transfer students and class registration is a model: pick a system everyone hates, measure why, and propose a change you can evaluate.

Immersive learning and work

XR for learning, accessibility, or professional practice — with Ma and Subramanian — if you can say what the headset is for.

Who this is for

HCI, learning sciences, or software-engineering backgrounds are all viable. You should enjoy writing, running studies, and arguing from evidence. A portfolio of interfaces helps; a portfolio of unanswered questions helps more.

Ph.D. Program →

Faculty in this program

Selected papers

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