Abstract:

This paper reports the design of four Digital Escape Rooms (DER) of the subject Mechanics of materials (Mecánica de materiales) of the 2nd year of the Food Engineering Degree and 3rd year of the Agricultural Degree at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, which are available for around 200 enrolled students in the aforementioned subjects.

Gamification has received growing attention last years in all educational contexts, and many authors have reported the gamified instruction significantly increases student’s motivation as a new and enjoying way of acquiring knowledge and skills.

Mechanics of materials is usually seen not only as a hard but also as a very low motivating subject by the students. Thus, added to the fact that students from these degrees have little desire to learn new concepts, leads to a poor outcome both with low grades and a very small percentage of passing students.

For years, students enrolled in this subject had to voluntarily answer some questionaries available in the Moodle platform, but they considered it very boring and around 85% of enrolled students never made them. This was the main reason for us to begin the project and try to increase student’s motivation in a more enjoyable way.

Instructors used Genially webpage to design four Escape Rooms, with questions similar to those available in Moodle quizzes, for concepts consolidation in a playful way. Students must solve challenges and small problems in order to progress through the escape room. Only when all questions required to overcome a challenge have been correctly answered, the student is allowed to go onto the next set of questions/challenges. This ensures that previous knowledge is understood before attempting on more difficult topics. A given time is set, and if students are able to escape (overcoming all the challenges) in such time, they are redirected to a small questionaire in order to get some feedback for analysis.

Although the DER are still in a pilot phase, they have already been tested by a reduced number of students we have really signficant results. About 95% of the students consider DER a very helpful learning tool and demand more material. They have also suggested some improvements we will include in the next batch of DER. It is still early to draw long-term conclusions but it seems that the pass rate is already increasing, and a more detailed set of results is included in the article.

The project has yielded very encouraging results, and therefore we feel DEG should be considered in every subject at all levels.

Keywords:

Digital Escape Rooms, Gamification.