Out-of-the-Box Learning: Digital Escape Rooms as a Metaphor for Breaking Down Barriers in STEM Education

Sidekerskienė, Tatjana; Damaševičius, Robertas

doi:10.3390/su15097393

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 65 publications

(78 reference statements)

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“…The development of sophisticated VR and AR technologies has enabled the creation of highly immersive and interactive virtual spaces [39,62]. These technologies allow users to experience a sense of presence and agency within virtual environments, making learning more engaging and experiential [33,74]. Furthermore, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are enhancing the adaptability and interactivity of these environments, enabling personalized and dynamic learning experiences [75].…”

Section: Background and Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtual Worlds for Learning in Metaverse: A Narrative Review

Damaševičius,

Sidekerskienė

2024

Sustainability

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As digital technologies continue to evolve, they offer unprecedented opportunities to transform traditional educational paradigms. Virtual worlds offer a dynamic and immersive platform for fostering sustainability education, bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. In these interactive environments, students can engage with complex ecological systems and sustainability challenges in a risk-free setting, allowing for experimentation and exploration that would be impractical or impossible in the real world. This study aims to investigate the application of various types of virtual worlds in educational settings, examine their characteristics and potential, and explore how they foster critical 21st-century skills like critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration. This paper comprehensively explores various types of virtual worlds—Adventure World, Simulation World, Creative World, Role-Playing World, and Collaborative World—assessing their impact on educational processes and outcomes. Adventure Worlds, with narrative-driven quests, engage students in exploratory learning within a story context. Simulation Worlds replicate real-world environments, allowing students to practice and hone practical skills in a risk-free setting. Creative Worlds provide open-ended, sandbox-like environments where innovation and imagination are paramount. Role-Playing Worlds facilitate empathy and perspective-taking through character-driven scenarios, while Collaborative Worlds emphasize teamwork and problem-solving in group projects. The narrative review methodology was adopted for the comprehensive analysis and synthesis of the literature to assess the impact and integration of virtual worlds in education, focusing on identifying trends, challenges, and opportunities within this domain. The evaluation methodology used in this study incorporates a mix of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), Concept-Knowledge (C-K) theory, Structure-behavior-function (SBF) modeling, the Framework for 21st Century Learning (P21), and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to evaluate the characteristics and educational potential of different virtual world types. Findings indicate that virtual worlds effectively support critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration skills, presenting a comprehensive analysis of how these environments can support, supplement, or transform traditional educational models. The main outcome of the study is the comprehensive exploration of various types of virtual worlds—Adventure World, Simulation World, Creative World, Role-Playing World, and Collaborative World—in education, demonstrating their significant potential to enhance learning experiences and outcomes through immersive, interactive environments that foster critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration skills.

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Section: Background and Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtual Worlds for Learning in Metaverse: A Narrative Review

Damaševičius,

Sidekerskienė

2024

Sustainability

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“…The subject areas in which educational escape rooms are used are also diverse, such as STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) (Karageorgiou, Mavrommati and Fotaris, 2019;Sidekerskienė and Damaševičius, 2023), public health (Bezençon et al, 2023), or entrepreneurship education (Martina and Göksen, 2022). Almost 30% of the studies identified by Fotaris and Mastoras (2019) involve health and welfare, followed by natural sciences, mathematics, and statistics (22%), social sciences, journalism and information (19%), and information and communication technologies (15%).…”

Section: Subject Areasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Low-Threshold Digital Educational Escape Rooms Based on 360VR and Web-Based Forms

Wolf,

Montag,

Söbke

et al. 2024

EJEL

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Escape rooms are an established game genre that has become popular in educational contexts in recent years. Digital escape rooms are variations, which use digital environments and may be played by participants not present on site. Compared to physical escape rooms, digital escape rooms are characterised by lower implementation and application efforts and at the same time by reduced intensity of the experiences. There is little evidence to date as to whether these low-threshold escape rooms are nevertheless sufficiently effective for learning. In this evaluation study, a learning activity based on a digital educational escape room (DEER) that uses the 360°-based spatial visualization (360VR) of a waterworks and a web-based form – contributing guidance and the escape room-specific challenges – is analysed. In the learning activity, students of environmental engineering study programs are asked to explore the 360VR-based waterworks guided by the instructions and challenges in the web-based form. Quantitative results of the study on learning outcomes and variables relevant to learning, such as emotion, motivation, and usability (N=73) are reported. The evaluation is supported by the qualitative results of guided interviews. Remarkably, some participants would have preferred to explore the 360VR environment without the guidance provided by the web-based form. Overall, the results show the learning effectiveness of the DEER, the efficacy of the web-based form as a guidance instrument, and values of learning-relevant variables that are conducive to learning. The DEER also achieved a high level of acceptance among students. Due to the low effort required for the creation of the DEER by lecturers and for application on the part of students, the presented combination of 360VR and web-based forms can be seen as a powerful low-threshold learning tool that enriches teaching.

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“…The study defines exercises with a pass rate below 0.6 as difficult; Exercises with a pass rate higher than 0.8 are defined as simple; Exercises with a pass rate between 0.6 and 0.8 are defined as having moderate difficulty. The calculation of the mastery of user knowledge points is Equation (12).…”

Section:  mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…E-learning has the advantages of personalization, informatization and rich resources, which makes it convenient for students to choose the courses they need, and at the same time, learning is not limited by time and place, making Lifelong learning possible. For example, the digital escape rooms proposed by Sidekerskiene and Damasevicius provide online alternatives to traditional physical escape rooms, enabling students to comfortably solve problems and challenges in their own homes or in the classroom [12]. However, due to the continuous increase in online education resources, it is easy for learners to fall into an information maze, making it difficult to find suitable or interesting learning resources.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Implementation of an English Learning System Based on Intelligent Recommendation

Yuan

2024

ITC

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The Internet has led to the rapid development of online education, but it has also caused redundancy in educational information. How to choose appropriate courses from a large number of online education resources has become a major problem for current learners. Therefore, the study proposes an English learning system based on efficient and deep Matrix decomposition. The results of the experiments showed that, in practical teaching applications, about 57.5% of students with good grades have improved their grades due to the use of the English learning system proposed by the research institute, with only about 17.5% of their grades decreasing. 67.5% of students with average grades have improved their grades after using the system, with only 10% decreasing. Among the students with poor grades, about 50% of them improved their academic performance through the system, while about 27.5% of them experienced a decrease. Meanwhile, the experiment also tested the efficient deep Matrix decomposition model in the learning system: the minimum absolute average errors of the model on different data sets are about 0.61, 0.69, 0.77 and 0.82, respectively. The minimum Root-mean-square deviation is about 0.91, 0.98, 1.06 and 1.1, which is far lower than other recommended models. The above results show that the system constructed in this paper can recommend courses accordingto students ‘actual learning level, and can effectively improve students’ academic performance in the actual teaching process.

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Out-of-the-Box Learning: Digital Escape Rooms as a Metaphor for Breaking Down Barriers in STEM Education

Cited by 15 publications

References 65 publications

Virtual Worlds for Learning in Metaverse: A Narrative Review

Virtual Worlds for Learning in Metaverse: A Narrative Review

Low-Threshold Digital Educational Escape Rooms Based on 360VR and Web-Based Forms

Design and Implementation of an English Learning System Based on Intelligent Recommendation

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