A learning analytics perspective on educational escape rooms

Abstract

ABSTRACT Learning analytics methods have proven useful in providing insights from the increasingly available digital data about students in a variety of learning environments, including serious games. However, such methods have not been applied to the specific context of educational escape rooms and therefore little is known about students' behavior while playing. The present work aims to fill the gap in the existing literature by showcasing the power of learning analytics methods to reveal and represent students' behavior when participating in a computer-supported educational escape room. Specifically, we make use of sequence mining methods to analyze the temporal and sequential aspects of the activities carried out by students during these novel educational games. We further use clustering to identify different player profiles according to the sequential unfolding of students' actions and analyze how these profiles relate to knowledge acquisition. Our results show that students' behavior differed significantly in their use of hints in the escape room and resulted in differences in their knowledge acquisition levels.