Refurbishing the Educational Escape Room for Programming: Lowering the Threshold and Raising the Ceiling

Abstract

Programming education at university level has often been identified as problematic learning. At the same time, prognosis for future labour market is increased need for professionals with programming and related skills. To meet demands of future society, K-12 schools around the world have integrated programming in the curriculum. However, research show challenges for integrating programming in K-12 education. Challenges include students’ and teachers’ struggle with learning and teaching programming, lack of time to properly incorporate programming in existing teaching and learning, and insufficient support for teachers. This study addresses these challenges by designing, developing, and evaluating an educational game on programming that combines the idea of game-based learning with digital escape rooms. In the game, the player develops knowledge about programming concepts to escape 10 rooms. The study’s main research question was: What are K-12 students’ perceptions of the game and what do they considered to be important design factors for a digital escape room game on computer programming? A design science approach was used for designing, developing, and evaluating a web-based escape room game on programming. This was conducted in a five-step process: 1) Explicating the problem, 2) Defining the requirements, 3) Designing and developing the artefact, 4) Demonstrating the artefact, and 5) Evaluating the artefact. The game was tested and evaluated by 32 K-12 students with a questionnaire during the autumn semester of 2021 and spring semester of 2022. Collected data were then analysed and grouped into categories to answer the study’s aim and research question. Findings of the study show several suggestions for further development and important design factors to consider when developing a digital escape room game. The next steps of research are to combine these findings with evaluations from teachers, and to incorporate this in an updated version of the game.

Educational Game Design for Girls and Boys

“…1), and the focus is on the basics of programming with the programming language Python, combined with fundamental ideas from Computational Thinking (CT), such as CT concepts, practices, and perspectives [47]. The syllabus framework, created and distributed by the Swedish national Agency for Education, for elementary school teachers' professional development in programming was used as a guideline for constructing the content of the game (or the challenges in each escape room) [48]. The concepts that constitute the challenges of the game, and were chosen from the syllabus framework, are variables, sequences, conditions, iterations, and functions.…”

“…Secondly, it is essential for game design to investigate the specific design factors for an educational game on learning to program. For a merge of these two aspects authors have combined the data sets from two earlier studies [20][21]. Carried out with a Design science approach, the aim of this study is to collect requirements for the development of a conceptual model.…”

Need-Based Game Design: Developing a CT Game Based on Educational Needs

“…Game-based learning (GBL) has emerged as a promising approach that effectively motivates students while simultaneously maintaining focus on learning (Klopfer, Osterweil & Salen, 2009;Humble, Mozelius & Sällvin, 2021;Humble, N., & Mozelius, P., 2022). Previous research has also shown promising results regarding students' engagement and attitudes towards computer programming when using GBL (Papadakis & Kalogiannakis, 2019).…”

Development of an Enjoyable Educational Game on Fundamental Programming: Designing for Inclusion and Learning Analytics

“…According to a report, 6 out of 10 Swedish internet users play games on either mobile devices, computers, or gaming consoles (Internetstiftelsen [The Swedish Internet Foundation], 2022). Games are also widely used for learning, both formal (Pan, Ke & Xu, 2022;, informal (Koutromanos & Avraamidou, 2014;Humble, Mozelius & Sällvin, 2021), and non-formal (Pienimäki, Kinnula & Iivari, 2021).…”