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Top1. Introduction
This paper explores the use of Educational Escape Room (EER) as a tool for motivating, training, and evaluating digital competencies in pre-service teachers. A pre-service teacher is a student enrolled in a teacher preparation program. They must complete degree requirements, including coursework and field experience, to earn a teaching license.
In Spain, there are four educational levels for children. Two of these, primary and secondary school, are mandatory. The other two, elementary or pre-primary and baccalaureate, are optional.
Digital skills are crucial for future teachers for two reasons. First, these competencies enable teachers to create and share their teaching materials. Second, it is necessary for their students to acquire these essential digital skills.
The course “Computer Science and Digital Competency” trains future teachers in these digital skills. Despite being a mandatory subject, students often fear this course, finding it hard to see its relevance in teaching practice. A study by Hijón-Neira et al. (2017) reveals a significant lack of programming and computing skills among primary in-service teachers in the Madrid Community. Therefore, it is important to motivate future teachers to embrace these skills, as they are typically hesitant to do so.
This research suggests using the EER game to assist pre-service teachers in developing digital competence. The significance of games is evident throughout the history of civilizations and even in the animal kingdom, serving functions such as “social play” and “learning roles”, among others (Clarke et al., 2016). Over centuries, various gaming techniques have been developed in the field of teaching. These techniques aim not only to make learning enjoyable for students, but also to foster thinking and teamwork skills through diverse, student-centred pedagogical strategies (Bilbao-Quintana et al., 2021).
Escape Room has gained popularity in education. It is a live-action game, grounded in a narrative that forms the basis of the game. In this game, a group of individuals aims to escape from a room by solving a series of challenges or puzzles tied to the narrative. Sometimes, they are aided by clues, all within a set time limit (Wiemker et al., 2015; Wilkinson & Little, 2021) .
This study uses an Educational Escape Room (EER) to enhance pre-service teachers’ motivation to learn programming and improve their understanding through practice. The EER, designed as a hybrid tool, combines virtual tools with real space, objects, and physical tests/puzzles. It serves as a narrative guide and tracks students’ progress in a virtual space.
The present study states two main hypotheses:
H1. EER, as an educational strategy, boosts the motivation of pre-primary and primary students by addressing complex concepts.
H2. Implementing EER as a teaching strategy allows students to perceive learning as a game, fostering feelings of accomplishment, challenge, guidance, competition, immersion, playfulness, and social experience.
The research questions are:
RQ1: Do students using the educational escape room outperform their counterparts in a typical practical classroom?
RQ2: Do students using the educational escape room perform better with different technologies than their counterparts in the control group?
RQ3: If students perform better in a certain group, which tools within that group show the greatest differences?
RQ4: Do students using the educational escape room have a more positive attitude towards the course than their counterparts in a typical practical classroom?
The article will present the EER experience and main results. After a detailed literature review on the application of ER in education, the “Materials and Methods” section will outline the EER configuration and the conducted research, explaining the selected indicators used to measure the results. The subsequent sections will present and analyse the results.