A Digital Escape Rooms for Learning General Physics in HEIs: Building the Universe in Five Rooms

Introduction

An educational escape room (EER) is an emerging learning methodology which consists in solving puzzles and other tasks placed in one or more rooms, in order to accomplish a specific goal in a preestablished and fixed amount of time (Nicholson, 2015). Since there is growing evidence that this methodology has a positive impact on student learning (Lopez-Pernas et al., 2021), (Wiemker et al, 2015), more and more teachers are interested in implementing it, but many of them lack the resources and knowledge to do so.

In this chapter, the authors aim to do their bit to help establish best practices in this field by sharing information gathered over several years of research and showing the experience of implementing a digital escape room (DER) on fundamental physics.

Therefore, the objectives of this chapter are:

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  To provide a useful theoretical foundation to help focus the design of EERs.

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  To share a practical example of the realization of a DER, as well as to show it evaluation process.

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  To discuss the results and the possible improvements.

Background

The authors implemented this educational game in the context of the Work Package 5 of the European Un-lock project. This project aims to provide the context, process and tools based on an innovative learning approach that stimulates the entrepreneurial skills of both students and educators, aiming to enhance employability, creativity and new professional paths. In this last phase of research, a study was carried out to understand which competencies are necessary for a teacher to be a facilitator of EERs. The conclusions, which are available free of charge on the project's official website (https://www.un-lock.eu/reports.html), were published in 2021 and have been extremely useful for the next phase, the Work Package 6, where a MOOC is currently being created to train teachers in the field of EERs.

In this context, the authors launched this DER with the interest of putting themselves in the shoes of educators, more specifically in a version that had to face the difficulties posed by the restrictions due to COVID19. That was the main reason why it was decided to implement the Escape Room on a digital platform.

EERs and DERs are not something that has just been invented. Regarding the EERs, a whole field of research has already been consolidated in which the different possibilities of implementing them and their effects on the learning process are being studied. However, in some disciplines there is very little published work. It is highly recommended to read (Terncanli et al., 2021) to get an idea of the state of the art in this area. In this review, the authors found that “most of the selected studies about EERs implemented in the fields of healthcare, including medicine, pharmacy, and nursing (53%). Accounting for approximately 22%, EERs from the fields of Computer Science and Engineering correspond to the second largest group of the examined literature. Another 11% could not be attributed to any specific group of academic subjects, in most cases because there were too few articles in those fields. This group comprises EERs in areas such as Environmental Education, Earthquake Preparedness, or Foreign Languages. Furthermore, multiple use cases were found in the fields of Library Education (8%) and other Natural Sciences (8%) […]” (Terncanli et al., 2021).