Get your students to SMILE!: Exploring emerging interaction technologies

Staying updated on new interface developments is crucial to any programming or software design class. This paper reports on experiences from introducing some of the many new post-WIMP I/O possibilities emerging from e.g. mobile and sensor (Microsoft Kinect) technologies. To help students remember the technologies in mind, the acronym SMILE (Speech - Movement - Image - Language - Environment) is introduced. The paper also describes some exercises developed (for C# and JavaScript) as well as lectures and classroom activities prepared especially for introducing the topic.