All HCI students are required to take an implementation/programming course to fulfill this required core course.

There are four approved Implementation Core Courses. You can learn more about each course below.

HCI 5840: Python Application Development in HCI
HCI/ComS/CprE 5750: Computational Perception
HCI/ME 5800: Virtual Environments, Virtual Worlds, and Application
ME 5570: Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling

HCI 5840: Python Application Development in HCI

This course is for students with no programming experience.
The students with no programming/Python knowledge must take the prerequisite course, HCI 5740: Computational Implementation and Prototyping.
When is this course offered:
- 5840 is offered online, asynchronously every Summer term and Fall semester.
- The prerequisite course, HCI 5740, is offered every Spring semester.
Students will learn the following in this course:
- over multiple stages, develop a large Python project of your choosing.
- write project design documents (“specs”), Python code + detailed documentation.
- stages: idea, specification, prototyping and implementation (including debugging, testing, refactoring) and documenting.
- deliverables: demo-able final product, user and programmer documentation.
- tools: Git versioning, Visual Studio Code IDE, Jupyter - maybe combine with R.
Course description: Implement Python code and write design documents (“specs”) and complement their code with sufficiently detailed documentation in development of a large Python project of the student's choosing. Typical development process: idea, specification, prototyping and implementation (including debugging, testing, refactoring) and documentation and result in a demo-able final product.
NOTE: if a student has prior programming experience, they can contact the HCI Program Coordinator at HCI@iastate.edu, and the prerequisite course can be waived by completing a pre-test.

HCI/ComS/CprE 5750: Computational Perception

This course is for students with advanced programming skills.
When is this course offered: Spring semester
Previous exposure to at least 2-3 of the following fields is highly recommended: statistics, linear algebra, computer vision, artificial intelligence, signal processing, human-computer interaction.
Topics covered: The class will cover the following topics: Overview of computational perception. Tutorials on Matlab and open computer vision (openCV). Basic image processing. Image filtering. Color and movement detection. Tracking techniques, including Kalman filters and particle filters. Face detection and face recognition: eigenfaces, cascades, and neural network-based approaches. Audio processing and speech segmentation. DFT and FFT. IDFT and IFFT. The spectrum of a signal. Audio filtering. Auditory feature extraction. Sound classification and recognition. The sense of self. Hidden Markov models for activity recognition and speech recognition. Gesture recognition.
Course Description: This class covers statistical and algorithmic methods for sensing, recognizing, and interpreting the activities of people by a computer. This semester we will focus on machine perception techniques that facilitate and augment human-computer interaction. The main goal of the class is to introduce computational perception on both theoretical and practical levels. Participation in small groups to design, implement, and evaluate a prototype of a human-computer interaction system that uses one or more of the techniques covered in the lectures.
See the Spring Spring 2023 Course website for more information.

HCI/ME 5800: Virtual Environments, Virtual Worlds, and Application

Students with no experience in Unity programming are encouraged to use LinkedIn Learning to understand the basics of this programming language.
When is this course offered: Spring semester
Course Goals and Learning objectives:
- At the end of this course, students will be knowledgeable about the field of virtual reality and augmented reality, including the human computer interaction aspects of application design, software, hardware, and current uses of the technology.
- Upon completing this course, students will be able to do the following:
  - Summarize the important concepts in virtual and augmented reality
  - Summarize the basics of developing a virtual reality application
  - Summarize the HCI aspects of the design of VR applications
  - Develop real-world VR applications
Course Description: A systematic introduction to the underpinnings of Virtual Environments (VE), Virtual Worlds, advanced displays and immersive technologies; and an overview of some of the applications areas particularly virtual engineering.

ME 5570: Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling

This course is for students with advanced programming skills. Programming experience in C, C++, basic knowledge in Linear Algebra.
When is this course offered: Spring semester, even years.
Course Description: Fundamentals of computer graphics technology. Data structures. Parametric curve and surface modeling. Solid model representations. Applications in engineering design, analysis, and manufacturing.
Course topics include: Introduction and overview of the field of computer graphics, a review of the basic elements (polylines, text, filled regions, raster images), display devices, input primitives and devices; Intro to OpenGL, Basics of graphics programming (opening a window, event programming, drawing lines) and development of some basic 2D graphics tools (polylines, polygons, mouse and keyboard interaction); Viewports and clipping; Window to Viewport transformation, World Coordinates; Relative Drawing; Drawing 2D shapes; Intro to parametric curves; Vector math review; Parametric lines and planes; Homogeneous coordinates; Intersections of lines and planes; Affine transformations in 2D and 3D; Changing coordinate systems, manipulating current transformations; Modeling with Polygonal meshes; Normal Vectors; Viewing Transformations; Perspective Projections; View Volume Clipping; Camera manipulation; Rendering and types of shading; Light Sources; Material Properties; Simple hidden surface removal; Texturing; Shadows; Curves and Surfaces; Bezier and Nurbs; Ray Tracing.