Abstract
Educational escape rooms are emerging as a new type of learning activity with the potential to enhance students' learning through highly engaging experiences. However, conducting educational escape rooms effectively is very complex and there are no software tools available for this purpose. This lack of support is hindering the widespread use and adoption of these activities. This article presents Escapp, a web platform that allows teachers to conduct effective and highly engaging educational escape rooms. The platform has been used for conducting three different educational escape rooms (one face-to-face and two remotely) in three higher education settings. Three case studies were conducted to empirically evaluate the usefulness of Escapp for conducting these activities, which involved more than 400 students. On the one hand, a questionnaire was administered to students to gather their opinions on the Escapp platform, obtaining very positive results in terms of overall usefulness, usability and engagement. On the other hand, data automatically recorded by Escapp during the three educational escape rooms are presented as evidence of the high number of student interactions that take place during activities of this kind and the need of using a software system for conducting them in an effective way. The results of this article show that Escapp is a well-suited solution for conducting effective face-to-face and remote educational escape rooms.
Highlights
According to [1], escape rooms can be defined as ‘‘live-action team-based games where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal in a limited amount of time’’
For each item tracked by Escapp, the total number of interactions recorded for each escape room, the maximum number of these interactions that took place within a minute, and the maximum number of these interactions that would have taken place within a minute if each escape room had been conducted in a single shift
In view of the results obtained, it becomes clear that the number of interactions that need to be handled when conducting these educational escape rooms is extremely high, which constitutes indisputable evidence of the immense effort it would entail for teachers if they were to handle them manually, not to mention the impossibility of doing so in the case of remote educational escape rooms
Summary
According to [1], escape rooms can be defined as ‘‘live-action team-based 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’’. A software system is essential in order to automatically detect students who need help or who are at risk of demotivation and provide them with useful hints in a timely manner, allowing them to progress toward successfully completing the escape room and toward accomplishing the learning objectives of the activity. Such system would open up a sea of possibilities for conducting educational escape rooms since it would allow including gamification elements such as leaderboards and points in order to promote competition among students, generating learning analytics (which could be used by the teachers during the activity or after it is over), or automatically grading students.
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