Software development is typically not taught and experienced primarily through books and lectures but instead through practice. However, university teaching entails time constraints, creating a mismatch between the theoretical knowledge from lectures and the practical challenges students face in accompanying projects. Trade-offs of selected practices might not apply, or not apply clearly enough, for students to experience and reflect on them.

Researchers conducting studies on programming tools often make use of maintenance tasks. The complexity of these tasks can significantly influence how participants behave. At the same time, the complexity of tasks is difficult to pinpoint due to the many sources of complexity for maintenance tasks. As a result, researchers may struggle to deliberately decide in which regard their tasks should be complex and in which regard they should be simple.To help researchers deliberately influence task complexity, we discuss different factors of task complexity. We draw these factors from 23 selected and 39 surveyed studies on programming tools. We arrange the factors according to a task complexity model from ergonomics research that we adapt for maintenance tasks. We illustrate the application of the factors through an example critique of a task design. In the end, task complexity might always be too complex to be fully controlled. Nevertheless, we hope that our discussion helps other researchers to decide in which dimensions their tasks are complex and in which dimensions they want to keep them simple.

The world is experiencing remote interaction in unprecedented frequency, as people stay in touch and work together remotely in pandemic times. IT solutions for remote work such as videoconferencing systems have received a lot of critical attention as they seem to induce fatigue. By contrast, in online video games, people collaborate passionately and energetically for hours at a time. In this paper, we introduce methodological frameworks for studying the impact of online video games on individual thinking capacities and team collaboration, with the goal of inspiring IT solutions for remote work. The research is grounded in neurodesign, an approach that uses neuroscientific research to underpin the analysis of how digital technology impacts humans. A major focus of this paper is body motion and virtual environments, tracing how they impact processes of team formation and creative thinking capacities, both during play and shortly thereafter. The paper reports on three pilot studies and methodological developments. The findings indicate that remote interaction leads to increased team cohesion and creative team performance, in particular when the interaction involves synchronous motion with a team partner, such as driving next to each other in Mario Kart on Nintendo Switch.

Game development benefits from short iterations, as it is often concerned with how a game will feel like; something that is hard to anticipate. Live programming aims at reducing the length of iterations during software development to allow for faster exploration and improve program comprehension. We propose a live game development environment providing a more general live programming workflow in game prototyping. The environment supports developers in two aspects: how will a code change affect the look and feel of the game and how does the behavior of the game relate to its code? The proof-of-concept environment ensures short feedback cycles by always keeping the game running while it is being developed. We propose several mechanisms to work with the running game, for example, programmers can automatically replay situations in the game by using an explicit notion of snapshots. We tentatively demonstrate the effectiveness of the live programming features in the context of the development of game prototypes of different genres.

Creativity is a central phenomenon in human life. World-famous scientists and artists are praised for their creative genius. Schools and universities seek to educate creativity in students and many employers want to hire creative personnel. However, the measurement of creativity is difficult up to the present day. Standard creativity tests typically require human expertise in the evaluation of test responses. This evaluation is often more time-intensive than taking the test itself. Moreover, creativity tests are still regularly conducted in a pen-and-paper format, rendering the data analysis all the more tedious. In this article, we propose a digital game for assessing creativity. It can be hosted online. The data analysis can be automated and conducted in real-time. The test is implemented as a tower defense game ("Immune Defense"). We submit that a video game constitutes a natural setting, as opposed to a formal testing scenario, and provides an opportunity to test real-life creativity. We use the game event data gathered during each round of the game to determine a player's creativity score. A study with 17 participants was performed to compare game-based creativity scores to scores obtained with a standard creativity test, the Alternative Uses Task. Our preliminary data validate the proposed approach.