Examining the Use of an Educational Escape Room for Teaching Programming in a Higher Education Setting

Abstract

In addition to being a well-liked form of recreation, escape rooms have drawn the attention of educators due to their ability to foster teamwork, leadership, creative thinking, and communication in a way that is engaging for students. As a consequence, educational escape rooms are emerging as a new type of learning activity under the promise of enhancing students' learning through highly engaging experiences. These activities consist of escape rooms that incorporate course materials within their puzzles in such a way that students are required to master these materials in order to succeed. Although several studies have reported on the use of escape rooms in a wide range of disciplines, prior research falls short of addressing the use of educational escape rooms for teaching programming, one of the most valuable skills of the twentyfirst century that students often have difficulties grasping. This paper reports on the use of an educational escape room in a programming course at a higher education institution and provide, for the first time, insights on the instructional effectiveness of using educational escape rooms for teaching programming. The results of this paper show that appropriate use of educational escape rooms can have significant positive impacts on student engagement and learning in programming courses. These results also suggest that students prefer these activities over traditional computer laboratory sessions. Finally, another novel contribution of this paper is a set of recommendations and proposals for educators in order to help them create effective educational escape rooms for teaching programming.

Escape Education: A Systematic Review on Escape Rooms in Education

“…The fifteen STEM ERs show a greater diversity in puzzle paths; sequential, path-based and hybrid puzzle paths, see Appendix I The use of a sequential puzzle path is four out of five times explained; students need to work according to a learned sequential analytic or other method (Healy, 2019;Järveläinen & Paavilainen -Mäntymäki, 2019;Vergne et al, 2019), or follow the historical footsteps of a scientist during his discovery and its consequences in time (Dietrich, 2018). The choice for path-based or hybrid structures (Borrego et al, 2017;Ferreiro-González et al, 2019;Guigon et al, 2018;Ho, 2018;Lopez-Pernas et al, 2019;Peleg et al, 2019;Watermeier & Salzameda, 2019) is motivated by the stimulation of active or collaborative learning by means of positive social interdependency. Students need to discuss the relation of the puzzles and build on each other's knowledge by forcing teams alternatively to split and cooperate during the gameplay (Borrego et al, 2017;Craig et al, 2019;Ferreiro-González et al, 2019;Giang et al, 2018;Guigon et al, 2018).…”

“…The rationale is that more linear pathways are easier for students to understand, and therefore less guidance is needed and the progression is easier to monitor (e.g. Guigon et al, 2018;Lopez-Pernas et al, 2019). Among the 39 ERs, the open structure seems used once, in an ER on communication and teamwork skills (Clarke et al, 2017).…”

“…Appendix I shows the group sizes in the studies. A group size of two was used once, to demand students to work on all the puzzles, and thereby on all concepts and skills (Lopez-Pernas et al, 2019). In 24 of the 32 studies which mention the team size, the range is 3-6 players, as educators want to prevent "free-riding", and create more participation and immersion of students during gameplay (Adams et al, 2018;Cain, 2019) Four additional studies advised a group size in this range after their gameplay with larger numbers.…”

“…In nine out of fifteen STEM ERs, IT tools are used mostly as part of the learning goals (e.g. Borrego et al, 2017;Giang et al, 2018;Lopez-Pernas et al, 2019). In addition, the technology is used to structure the game and thereby ease the work of the teacher which is especially important for large groups (Guigon et al, 2018;Järveläinen & Paavilainen -Mäntymäki, 2019).…”

A Scalable Interactive Mixed Reality Escape Room Simulation for Anatomy Learning

“…Research finds that escape rooms are a good way of providing this simulated environment for group learning. [1]- [3].…”