The majority of information was gathered from lectures on Twitch since Twitch offers a playback of the chat even after the stream is finished. All of the recordings of Zoom that we looked at did not include the chat and the number of Zoom lectures that we were able to join was limited. Another problem for some of the Zoom lectures was that they only occasionally meet and otherwise learn the information from prerecorded videos, which made it harder to find sessions that we could join to observe the live chat. For these reasons it was harder to gain a meaningful first look at Zoom.

We focused on streams that were marked as lectures, but also looked at a seminar and exercise for comparison. The streams that were the most accessible were for 'Einführung in die Informatik und Medieninformatik (EIMI)', 'Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten' and 'Zentralübung OOP' on Twitch. As a lecture, EIMI was particularly interesting since we plan to focus our research mainly on lectures. Therefore we looked at all the currently available lectures and searched for any changes that occurred and were fairy noticeable the further the lectures go on.

The students on Twitch wrote a lot more compared to the sample on Zoom. The amount of engagement was especially high in the first lecture. The reasons for this are a lot of questions about the organization of the course, a lot of Emojis, off-topic discussions and most notably from people that were probably not students, which led to spam and a confusing and overloaded chat, which made it hard to notice some legitimate questions. Some students also noted that they preferred Twitch over Zoom in regards to audio and video quality.

The following session introduced moderators and removed the previously present disturbance. Questions about the organization of the course were still present in the first few sessions, but they subsided after a while. When technical problems arose, the chat was spammed with text to gain the attention of the instructor.

Overall, Twitch offered a more friendly and joking atmosphere compared to Zoom, which probably feels a lot more official and serious in comparison. In the most recent lectures, the students were also more focused on the topic. The amount of messages that were written decreased in each lecture as well, although we expect that the number should start to stagnate or rise again if a hard topic appears that is hard to understand.

The amount of messages at that point was similar to the seminar that mostly focused on showing best practices for research. The exercise on the other hand required a lot more engagement from the students and therefore had a lot more engagement. It also lacked the more lax language on a first view and it was mainly focused on the exercises, how to solve them, answering questions and helping students with their questions.

Something noteworthy is that on Twitch it seems like the students are interacting a lot more with each other. Maybe this is because they are used to talking on Twitch or that the platform feels more welcoming to students. This may suggest that the familiarity with the platform or what the platform usually offers plays a part in how students interact with each other.

Overall, this investigation offered some interesting pointers that might help us when we formulate our research question. The amount of messages decreased from lecture to lecture, compared to Zoom students use lax and joking language more, the chat has a more accessible atmosphere and noticeably more student-to-student interactions were present. Looking at the different forms of streams (lecture, seminar, exercise) also suggests that there are differences between them, so we want to only focus on lectures to remove interaction differences that occur between these three forms of content presentation.