Abstract
In recent years, educational escape rooms have started to gain momentum in the academic community. Prior research has reported on the use of educational escape rooms in several fields. However, earlier works have failed to assess the impact of this sort of activities for teaching programming in terms of learning effectiveness. This work fills the existing gap in the literature by examining an educational escape room for teaching programming in a higher education setting by means of three different instruments: (1) a pre-test and a post-test for measuring learning gains, (2) a survey for assessing students' perceptions, and (3) a web platform for recording student interaction data during the activity. The results of this work provide, for the first time, empirical evidence that educational escape rooms are an effective and engaging way of teaching programming.
Highlights
Gamification is commonly known as ‘‘the use of game design elements in non-game contexts’’ [1]
The difference in scores between the post-test and the pretest was found to be statistically significant with a medium to large effect size, showing that students experienced an increase in knowledge as a result of the educational escape room
This finding confirms the initial hypothesis of the present study that educational escape rooms are an effective way to teach programming in higher education, as foreshadowed by the results shown in prior works that examined the use of educational escape rooms in other disciplines [28]–[30], and those of other works that examined the use of serious games and other gamification approaches for teaching programming [35]–[39]
Summary
Gamification is commonly known as ‘‘the use of game design elements in non-game contexts’’ [1]. A trend that has started to draw the attention of educators is the use of escape rooms in educational contexts. Escape rooms can be defined as ‘‘live-action teambased games where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal (usually escaping from the room) in a limited amount of time’’ [2]. The use of escape rooms in educational contexts has proven capable of bringing many benefits for students, leveraging skills such as teamwork, leadership, creative thinking, and communication [3]–[8]. Teachers can create educational escape rooms (i.e. escape rooms designed for learning purposes), which have the potential to bring additional valuable benefits for students. Since escape rooms are inherently a game concept, it has been suggested that the term ‘‘gameful
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