Let's Jazz: a Case Study on Teaching Music with Educational Escape Rooms

Abstract

Escape rooms have been proven to be a functional game-based approach to teach a variety of subjects. Teachers as well as students are eager to play escape rooms in the classroom; field studies have demonstrated how escape games are a memorable activity with a high retention rate, especially if followed by a proper debriefing session, in which learnings emerged and are made consistent. In recent years literature on educational escape rooms has grown, yet there is little body of research on educational escape rooms on music education. In this paper we present an educational escape room about Afro-American music at the beginning of the past century. The players are asked to solve a murder case happened in the backstage of a jazz club in New Orleans. Such scenario gives the players/students the opportunity to "experience", within the escape room context, cultural and historical details and characteristics related to this musical genre. The puzzles within the escape room are formally related to jazz and Afro-American music, giving players/students the possibility to learn and have a "first-hand" experience with concepts that would otherwise remain purely theoretical within a normal classroom environment. Learning has been measured by the means of a 3-step test design: the pre-test was administered before playing the escape room, the first post-test was administered right after playing the escape room and before the debriefing, while the second post-test was administered two weeks after the debriefing phase. From a qualitative point of view the teacher has noticed high motivation while playing the game, with respect to a normal classroom activity. The quantitative results of the second post-test have shown students have retained many of the concepts presented within the escape room and this highlights the importance of a debriefing phase to consolidate learning after playing an educational escape room.

Using an Escape Room activity to Enhance the Motivation of Undergraduate Life Science Students in Mathematics Classes - A Case Study

“…However, despite this limitation, the study's results demonstrate that incorporating an Escape Room (ER) activity enhances student engagement and motivation for learning by making the learning process enjoyable. These findings align with similar studies conducted by Babazadeh and Frigerio (2021), Huang et al (2020), Nicholson (2018), and Papadakis and Stavrakis (2020). Furthermore, students perceive the ER activity as an effective tool for promoting learning and recommend it as a pedagogical methodology.…”

The iBuddy experience: A digital simulation-based approach to enhance secondary school students’ privacy awareness

“…While this part of the session was of course less interactive and engaging, only a minority saw this as a problem and, in general, the students appreciated being able to discuss and understand what was previously only seen and felt. This confirms the importance of debriefing in game-based instruction (Babazadeh et al, 2022;Peters & Vissers, 2004). Moreover, the modularity of the debriefing phase, illustrated above, made it possible to adjust the activity to the specific class and situation, avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach.…”

“…The learning impact of a game-based session (including simulations-based) strongly relies on the feedback (Hays, 2010) or debriefing (Babazadeh et al, 2022;Betrus & Botturi, 2010;Peters & Vissers, 2004) that the instructor provides. So, we set out to design also a proper debriefing session to integrate the simulation experience and integrated "cliffhangers" or pointers to the debriefing already during the design of the simulation (Peters & Vissers, 2004).…”

Matching Game Genre with Lesson Content – A Development of Blood Circulation Racing Game

“…This effort is motivated by the belief that such synchronization may support a better understanding of content. Studies on matching genre to lessons in game-based learning include role-playing as an Indonesian warrior character in Battle of Surabaya (Rinaldi et al, 2022), solving a murder case at the backstage of a New Orleans jazz club to experience and learn jazz and Afro-American music concepts (Babazadeh et al, 2022). This paper highlights the development effort of an educational game with this characteristic.…”