Creativity room 5555: evoking creativity in game design amongst CS students

This paper highlights the importance of computer-free meeting places for Computer Science (CS) students participating in game design courses in the sense of learning spaces. Such environments have the potential of countering possible negative attitudes of CS students towards creative processes. During a game design course we offered a unique meeting room that offered playful and creative elements. Furthermore, the room had to be rearranged by the participants of the course. We describe the course and analyze it through observations and three formal surveys. Both the results and the quality of resulting prototypes indicate that CS students strongly benefit in their creative processes from working in individually arranged playful environments.