Learning from Escape Rooms? A Study Design Concept Measuring the Effect of a Cryptography Educational Escape Room

Traunkar

2022

ECGBL

Future jobs will require students to handle interdisciplinary knowledge that goes beyond computing techniques when it comes to mathematics education. The traditional approach to education insufficiently develops the needed mathematical skills and mathematical literacy and there is a need to devise new methods of teaching and learning. We introduce game-based learning in mathematics education through carefully designed activities aiming at interdisciplinarity and increasing students’ motivation, mathematical and digital literacy, physical activity, level of knowledge, etc. We propose the treasure hunt cantered around cryptography as an example activity that satisfies the described criteria. Parts of the clues leading to the treasure are hidden using different ciphers, following the historical development of cryptography. The treasure hunt is time-limited to one hour and, to successfully complete the search, students need to learn, adapt, and apply different methods of encryption and decryption. To complete the hunt in time, students must work as a team and effectively divide the tasks among themselves. Students have at their disposal all instructions and manuals in written form, and they are compelled to read with comprehension. We conducted the activity with several groups of high school students with no previous knowledge and skills in the field of cryptography. Students were asked to take a pre-test and post-test survey about their experience and familiarity with cryptography concepts. Most teams completed the search and achieved all learning outcomes. In the paper, we will describe the activity in detail, analyse the test results and give additional examples of game-based activities in mathematics education.

Section: Game-based Teaching and Learningmentioning

confidence: 61%

Treasure Hunt as a Method of Learning Mathematics

Traunkar

2022

ECGBL

“…Among all the studies analyzed by the aforementioned literature reviews, only eight have reported the application of an educational escape room in a higher-education setting for teaching topics closely related to software engineering [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15]. In this aspect, it is noteworthy to mention that none of these studies have performed a comparison between the educational escape room and a traditional approach through a randomized controlled trial or a quasiexperiment using control and experimental groups.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lastly, three studies have reported the application of educational escape rooms for instructing undergraduate students in cybersecurity topics [8], [9], [10]. The first of these studies presented an educational escape room for teaching cryptographic systems, compression algorithms, and Internet protocols [8].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Are Educational Escape Rooms More Effective Than Traditional Lectures for Teaching Software Engineering? A Randomized Controlled Trial

Gordillo,

López-Fernández

2024

IEEE Trans. Educ.

This article analyzes the learning effectiveness of a virtual educational escape room for teaching software engineering and compares this activity with traditional teaching through a randomized controlled trial.Background: Educational escape rooms have been used across a wide variety of disciplines at all levels of education and they are becoming increasingly popular among teachers. Nevertheless, there is a clear general need for more robust empirical evidence on the learning effectiveness of these novel activities and, particularly, on their application in software engineering education.Research Questions: Is game-based learning using educational escape rooms more effective than traditional lectures for teaching software engineering? What are the perceptions of software engineering students toward game-based learning using educational escape rooms?Methodology: The study presented in this article is a randomized controlled trial with a pre-and post-test design that was completed by a total of 326 software engineering students. The 164 students belonging to the experimental group learned software modeling by playing an educational escape room whereas the 162 students belonging to the control group learned the same subject matter through a traditional lecture.Findings: The results of the randomized controlled trial show that the students who learned software modeling through the educational escape room had very positive perceptions toward this activity, significantly increased their knowledge, and outperformed those students who learned through a traditional lecture in terms of knowledge acquisition.

“…Figure 2: SERF Framework(Snyder, 2018) So,Seebauer et al (2020) developed the EduER framework combining all the escapeEd (black) basic procedures with all the essential factors of the SERF framework (blue). This combination resulted in six phases (Figure3).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptability and Procedural Content Generation for Educational Escape Rooms

Sousa

Coelho

Torres

et al. 2022

ECGBL

We present a literature review that aims to understand the role of the Educational Escape Room (EER) in improving the teaching, learning, and assessment processes through an EER design framework. The main subject is to identify the recent interventions in this field in the last five years. Our study focuses on understanding how it is possible to create an EER available to all students, namely visually challenged users. As a result of the implementation of new learning strategies that promote autonomous learning, a concern arose in adapting educational activities to each student’s individual needs. To study the adaptability of each EER, we found the EER design framework essential to increase the student experience by promoting the consolidation of knowledge through narrative and level design. The results of our study show evidence of progress in students’ performance while playing an EER, revealing that students' learning can be effective. Research on Procedural Content Generation (PCG) highlighted how important it is to implement adaptability in future studies of EERs. However, we found some limitations regarding the process of evaluating learning through the EERs, showing how important it is to study and implement learning analytics in future studies in this field.