Veranstaltungsprogramm

<p>Teaching and learning are increasingly shaped by technological, social, and economic change, intensifying debates on how educational practice should respond to emerging professional and societal demands [1]. In this context, education is expected to foster not only disciplinary knowledge but also broader competences such as lifelong learning, innovation, digital literacy, and collaboration [2]. At the same time, culturally diverse learning environments require students to engage constructively with difference and to develop skills for intercultural interaction [3]. In higher education, however, diversity-related content is still often taught primarily through theoretical models, while opportunities to apply this knowledge in collaborative settings remain limited. Game-based learning can be understood as the intentional pedagogical use of digital or analogue games to support specific learning objectives [4]. Previous research further suggests that educational escape rooms have mainly been implemented in discipline-specific fields, indicating that their application to cross-cutting topics such as diversity has so far received less attention [5].</p>

<p>Against this background, the paper investigates whether a hybrid educational escape room can support the transfer of diversity-related theory into collaborative practice and foster students’ intercultural awareness. The intervention was implemented within a revised module on diversity and intercultural communication at a university of applied sciences. The course design combined a structured digital self-study phase with an applied classroom phase. Within this framework, the escape room integrated digital puzzle-solving with rotating small-group work at physical learning stations.</p>

<p>Methodologically, the study follows a design-based intervention approach. The evaluation draws on structured observations of team interaction, behavioural log data from gameplay, and a standardised post-activity survey. The findings indicate that the format promoted active participation, collaborative negotiation, and cooperation across changing group constellations. Particularly high ratings were found for participation balance, conflict handling, and team adaptation. At the same time, the results point to challenges in selected tasks, as well as to a need for more preparation time, technical support, and additional scaffolding during gameplay.</p>

<p>The paper concludes that hybrid educational escape rooms represent a promising format for application-oriented diversity teaching in higher education. Their particular value lies in translating theoretical concepts into collaborative and reflective learning processes and in strengthening the connection between conceptual knowledge and situated practice in heterogeneous learning environments.</p>

Traditional software development (TSD) relied on written specifications and detailed documentation (Mahboob et al., 2024) that caused excessive amounts of extra-work and, thus, slowed progress and often became obsolete when requirements changed during the project (Nanduri, 2025). That is why during the last two decades, the software industry more and more adopts Agile Software Development (ASD) approaches, such as Scrum and Kanban, for running flexibly through the project and focusing on the main task of software development (Tasneem et al., 2025; Oroy & John, 2024). ASD is guided by the “Agile Manifesto” (Beck et al., 2001), particularly through its second core value, which emphasizes “working software over comprehensive documentation”.

In today’s ASD, however, documentation remains essential, particularly in software development projects involving multiple developers and different stakeholders (Williams, 2024). In ASD practice, effective collaboration depends on documentation that serves as external team memory and enables knowledge transfer across the various roles and stakeholders in ASD teams (ASDT) (Brown et al., 2024). This, in turn, fosters informed participation and co-creation (Ates et al., 2025; Rosenbichler et al., 2020).

This is what can be referred to as the “documentation dilemma” in ASD (Nair, 2026; Canedo et al., 2024): Although documentation may limit flexibility, require additional effort, and hinder progress, it remains essential in ASD.

In our research we aim at understanding the documentation dilemma in ASD in detail. We particularly seek to analyze at which points in the ASD process documentation is executed by the developers and for what reasons. This provides us with a basis for the second step of our research, in which we aim to suggest the use of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) with its ability to compose human-like texts as a “Cybernetic Teammate” that supports the documentation work in ASD teams (Dell'Acqua et al., 2025). Specifically, we develop a theoretical Human-in-the-Loop concept that illustrates a collaboration between this “Cybernetic Teammate” and the software developers. Our research is guided by the following research question:

How can GenAI support agile documentation to mitigate the documentation dilemma and facilitate shared understanding as a foundation for digital participation?

<p>Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) offers unique opportunities for participatory learning by enabling collaborative knowledge construction and co-creative engagement in digital environments. Theoretical approaches such as the Cognitive Affective Model of Immersive Learning (CAMIL; Makransky &amp; Petersen, 2021) propose that learning in VR is shaped by technological features such as immersion and users’ degree of control, which give rise to psychological affordances like presence and agency, which, in turn, shape cognitive and affective processes and learning outcomes. While a growing body of empirical research supports the relevance of presence and agency, much of this evidence relies on media comparison studies contrasting VR with less interactive formats. Such designs have been criticized for confounding technological and instructional features, limiting causal interpretations (e.g., Lawson &amp; Martella, 2023; Mulders et al., 2023) and offering little guidance for designing VR environments that effectively foster presence and agency. Moreover, studies that manipulate interactivity (e.g., Petersen et al., 2022) often rely on relatively weak operationalizations, such as contrasting user-controlled navigation and initiation of pre-defined content with passive observation of a pre-recorded walkthrough, thereby varying user control only to a limited extent.</p>

<p>To address this gap, a controlled experimental pilot study was conducted as part of a supervised high-school research project (N = 10). In both conditions, participants could freely move and interact within the VR environment while an instructor provided explanations. However, in the lower activity condition the instructor controlled the devices and experiments, whereas in the higher activity condition participants operated them themselves. This design enabled a controlled comparison of user control while keeping core design features comparable. Results indicate that participants in the higher activity condition reported lower negative agency (z = −1.09, r = .33, medium effect). Contrary to expectations, they also reported lower positive agency (z = −1.19, r = .36, medium effect) and presence (z = −0.86, r = .27, small-to-medium effect). Effects on learning outcomes were small, with minor advantages for the higher activity condition in retention (z = −0.33, r = .10) and conceptual understanding (z = −0.46, r = .14), while delayed effects were negligible and partly favored the lower activity condition. None of these effects reached statistical significance, likely due to the small sample size.</p>

<p>These findings suggest that increasing activity does not necessarily enhance perceived agency and presence and may even reduce them under certain conditions, highlighting the importance of carefully designing user control rather than simply increasing interactivity. The study points to the need for further research on how control and instructional design jointly shape learning in immersive environments.</p>