POSSIBLE UTILIZATION OF GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS FOR CREATING DIGITAL EDUCATIONAL ESCAPE ROOMS

Abstract

Escape rooms used for teaching purposes are usually called educational escape rooms. Educational escape rooms are cooperative games designed for teaching particular educational material based on a series of narrative-driven puzzles that group(s) of pupils/students must solve within a limited time to achieve the goal of the game and leave a room or environment (or alternatively break into the locked box or unravel a mystery). The shift to online teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic increased the use of educational escape rooms in a digital format. Digital educational escape rooms are escape game-like interactive activities (based on educational content) that are made with digital technologies. Most of the research studies and literature reviews suggest that digital educational escape rooms could have some positive impacts on students’ cognitive, behavioral, and affective learning outcomes. However, a significant amount of digital escape games created by teachers lack engaging story, challenging narrative-based puzzles (that are related to specific learning objectives), and cohesive graphics. Therefore, the practical usability and effectiveness of such games in real and virtual learning environments are questionable. In the field of educational game development, generative artificial intelligence can play a significant role in simplifying the process, improving quality, and saving time. This paper discusses how teachers could utilize generative artificial intelligence tools to ease and improve the creation process of digital educational escape rooms. In other words, this paper provides examples of how elements of digital escape games (such as narrative, game environment images, and puzzles) can be created with generative artificial intelligence tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Bing Image Creator, Stable Diffusion, AutoDraw, etc.).