Harrison Earns Teaching Innovation Award at Celebration of Education

Chris Harrison, an associate professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), received the university's 2025 Teaching Innovation Award to recognize his transformative work on the course "Designing Human-Centered Software." The award was presented on Thursday, April 25, as part of CMU's Celebration of Education, which honors members of the CMU community who exemplify the university's commitment to teaching excellence and student learning.

Since joining CMU in 2014, Harrison has led the course's redevelopment, introducing a range of innovative features to make the material more engaging, hands-on and reflective of real-world challenges. Among the most effective additions Harrison has made to the course is a series of design assignments known as "Bakeoffs," which have become a defining feature of the course and a favorite among students.

"Professor Harrison always brings new, interesting ways of connecting concepts that bring insights you would have never thought about," said Samuel Parks, an undergraduate student minoring in human-computer interaction.

First introduced in 2015, Bakeoffs are short, open-ended challenges that allow student teams to develop solutions to a shared problem starting with a base design and scaffold code that Harrison provides. Each challenge focuses on a measurable goal — such as improving interaction speed or text input performance — and culminates in a class-wide, real-time evaluation event featuring a live leaderboard.

"Bakeoffs function as large, real-time user studies," Harrison said. "Students act as both participants and system designers, and the event gives them a rare opportunity to see how their ideas hold up against others who started from the same point but took a different approach."

Throughout the assignment, students are required to document their ideation, implementation and evaluation process in video submissions, which serve as the primary basis for grading — not leaderboard performance. Harrison also randomizes teams for each Bakeoff and incorporates peer evaluations to support accountability and collaborative learning.

"The Bakeoffs are a unique opportunity to learn, safely fail and succeed in a sandboxed environment that fosters learning, creativity and problem solving without getting lost in the process," said HCII Assistant Professor David Lindlbauer. "Students learn from the successes, and mistakes, of themselves and others, and the positive nature of the projects allows them to push their own personal boundaries."

The course's unique structure and experiential learning model have contributed to its rising popularity, prompting the department to scale it to five independently taught sections in fall 2025 — and making it one of the most in-demand courses the institute offers.

"Students significantly sharpen their skills as designers, iterators and evaluators throughout the semester," Harrison said. "You can see the quality of their work improve across Bakeoffs, and students recognize it in themselves, which reinforces what we're teaching."

To celebrate Bakeoff successes, Harrison also creates and awards themed trophies — handmade in his lab — that have become a lighthearted but memorable part of the course.

For more information about this year's honorees, visit the Celebration of Education website.