Teaching and Learning with Escape Games from Debriefing to Institutionalization of Knowledge

Escape rooms technology as a way of teaching mathematics to secondary school students

The aim of this study is to determine whether Escape Rooms can be used as an active methodological approach for the purpose of teaching mathematics. The research adapted a quantitative approach via an experimental design. Two different study groups were established, the first of which comprised the control group who were taught using conventional training methods, and the second consisted of the experimental group, who were taught using a novel approach incorporating an Escape Room activity. The participants included 80 students who were all attending secondary school within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The findings revealed how the activity involving the Escape Room led to a significant enhancement in the student's motivation, achievement and autonomy. The conclusion can be drawn that using an Escape Room in mathematics teaching can enhance learning achievement, anxiety, motivation and autonomy, with students' negative attitudes regarding mathematics learning considered as an important variable, particularly with respect to autonomy and motivation. Hence, Escape Rooms can potentially be more effective than conventional methods for teaching mathematics.

Migration of an Escape Room-Style Educational Game to an Online Environment: Design Thinking Methodology

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has led to a sudden change in education, closing schools and shifting to online teaching, which has become an enormous challenge for teachers and students. Implementing adequate online pedagogical approaches and integrating different digital tools in the teaching process have become a priority in educational systems. Finding a way to keep students' interest and persistence in learning is an important issue that online education is facing. One possible way to establish engaging and interactive learning environments, using the energy and enthusiasm of students for educational purposes, is the use of game-based learning activities and gamification of different parts of the educational process.

Objective

This paper presents a use case of migrating an escape room–style educational game to an online environment by using the design thinking methodology. We wanted to show that the design thinking methodology is useful to create engaging and motivating online games that provide educational value.

Methods

Starting from students’ perspective, we created a simple digital escape room–style game where students got an opportunity to self-assess their knowledge in computer science at their own pace. Students tested this prototype game, and their opinions about the game were collected through an online survey. The test's goal was to evaluate the students' perceptions about the implemented digital escape room–style educational game and gather information about whether it could achieve students' engagement in learning computer science during online teaching.

Results

In total, 117 students from sixth and seventh grades completed the survey regarding the achieved student engagement. Despite the differences in students’ answers about game complexity and puzzle difficulty, most students liked the activity (mean 4.75, SD 0.67, on a scale from 1 to 5). They enjoyed the game, and they would like to participate in this kind of activity again (mean 4.74, SD 0.68). All (n=117, 100%) students found the digital escape room–style educational game interesting for playing and learning.

Conclusions

The results confirmed that digital escape room–style games could be used as an educational tool to engage students in the learning process and achieve learning outcomes. Furthermore, the design thinking methodology proved to be a useful tool in the process of adding novel educational value to the digital escape room–style game.

Learning with a digital escape room game: before or after instruction?

In this study, we investigated whether playing an escape room game after explicit instruction (instruction-first group, N = 20) is more effective to learn about copyright and media law than playing the game before explicit instruction (problem-solving-first group, N = 21). This is an important question as escape room games are complex, problem-based learning environments that can overwhelm learners and thus hinder the acquisition of knowledge and skills. According to cognitive load theory, preparing learners with explicit instruction before problem-solving activities can overcome this problem leading to better learning. However, in the productive failure paradigm problem-solving before explicit instruction is seen as more effective, especially when it comes to the application of newly acquired knowledge to solve novel problems. Based on these two theories, we conducted an experiment and found that playing the developed digital escape room game after explicit instruction was more effective for knowledge retention and domain-specific self-efficacy with at the same time lower cognitive load. However, we found no differences regarding the application of knowledge as both groups scored equally high on transfer tasks. The result is discussed considering previous productive failure studies mostly conducted in the science and engineering domain. In sum, the instruction first approach proved to be effective for both knowledge acquisition and knowledge application, leading to higher domain-specific self-efficacy and lower cognitive load. Therefore, we conclude that the implementation of escape room games after instruction is an effective instructional approach and better suited to promote learning than playing escape room games before instruction.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s41039-022-00187-x.