Abstract
Design and art students learn in workshops and through practical activities. They are not usually experienced in physical computing. However, this is fundamental for creating smart things, part of our internet-of-things world and hence of creative design and art work. Moreover, these students’ creativity was severely hampered due to the COVID-19 pandemic: used to working on practical projects by interacting with different sorts of material, they were forced to learn in a new setting, at distance. This paper reports on a workshop which was run with design and art students, led by researchers in human computer interaction and industrial design. The workshop, held at a distance in a single day, did not assume any programming experience. It relied on a game tool, which was re-purposed for the workshop, by following a meta-design approach. The workshop challenged design and art students to explore and create smart things, by playing the game. Data were collected with multiple methods and analysed so as to study the creativity of students’ products and extract useful lessons for designing with design and art students or practitioners, also at a distance.