Live streaming sites such as Twitch offer new ways for remote audiences to engage with and affect gameplay. While research has considered how audiences interact with games, HCI lacks clear demarcations of the potential design spaces for audience participation. This paper introduces and validates a theme map of audience participation in game live streaming for student designers. This map is a lens that reveals relationships among themes and sub-themes of Agency, Pacing, and Community—to explore, reflect upon, describe, and make sense of emerging, complex design spaces. We are the first to articulate such a lens, and to provide a reflective tool to support future research and education. To create the map, we perform a thematic analysis of design process documents of a course on audience participation for Twitch, using this analysis to visually coordinate relationships between important themes. To help student designers analyze and reflect on existing experiences, we supplement the theme map with a set of mapping procedures. We validate the applicability of our map with a second set of student designers, who found the map useful as a comparative and reflective tool.

Feedback is a key element of project-based learning, but only if students reflect on and learn from the feedback they receive. Students often struggle to deeply engage with feedback, whether due to lack of confidence, time, or skill. This work seeks to identify challenges that make reflecting on feedback difficult for students, and to design possible solutions for supporting reflection. Through observing two university game design courses, our research found that without concrete reflection strategies, students tended to be attracted to feedback that looks useful, but does not necessarily them move forward. When we introduced three different reflection scaffolds to support students, we found that the most effective approach promoted interactive learning by allowing time for self-reflection before team reflection, offering time limits, providing activities for feedback prioritization, helping teams align their goals, and equalizing team member participation. We present design guidelines for future systems to support reflection on feedback.

Peer feedback is essential for learning in project-based disciplines. However, students often need guidance when acting as either a feedback provider or a feedback receiver, both to gain from peer feedback and to criticize their peers' work. This paper explores how to more effectively scaffold this exchange such that peers more deeply engage in the feedback process. Within a game design course, we introduced different processes for feedback receivers to write questions to guide peer feedback. Feedback receivers wrote four main types of guiding questions: improve, share, brainstorm, critique. We found that "improve'' questions tended to lead to better feedback (more specific, critical, and actionable) than other question types, but feedback receivers wrote improve questions least often. We offer insights on how best to scaffold the question-writing process to facilitate peer feedback exchange.

Peer feedback is a central activity for project-based design education. The prevalence of devices carried by students and the emergence of novel peer feedback systems enables the possibility of collecting and sharing feedback immediately between students during class. However, pen and paper is thought to be more familiar, less distracting for students, and easier for instructors to implement and manage. To evaluate the efficacy of in-class digital feedback systems, we conducted a within-subjects study with 73 students during two weeks of a game design course. After short student presentations, while instructors provided verbal feedback, peers provided feedback either on paper or through a device. The study found that both methods yielded comments of similar quality and quantity, but the digital approach provided additional ways for students to participate and required less effort from the instructors. While both methods produced similar behaviors, students held inaccurate perceptions about their behavior with each method. We discuss design implications for technologies to support in-class feedback exchange.

Peer feedback systems enable students to get feedback without substantially burdening the instructor. However, current systems typically ask students to provide feedback after class; this introduces challenges for ensuring relevant, timely, diverse, and sufficient amounts of feedback, and reduces time available for student reflection. This paper explores the current landscape of peer feedback tools and introduces a novel system for in-class peer review called PeerPresents where students can quickly exchange feed-back on projects without being burdened by additional work outside of class. Through an exploratory study with Google docs and a preliminary evaluation of PeerPresents, we find students can receive immediate, copious, and diverse peer feedback through a structured in-class activity. Students also described the feedback they received as helpful and reported that they gave more feedback than without using the system. These early results demonstrate the potential benefits of in-class peer feedback systems.