Abstract:

Teaching mathematics has generally been a challenge for the teacher due to the students’ rejection towards this subject and its notions. In order to change this situation, it is important to explore new teaching and learning approaches. In the framework of active learning and innovative teaching instruction methodologies, gamification is the application of game components in non-game situations. Particularly, it is used in the educational field to encourage various students’ abilities like teamwork, motivation, perception, and engagement. Developing these skills is crucial in fields like mathematics where there is a general demotivation between learners. In the context of gamification, escape rooms have been used for educational purposes rather than just for participants’ entertainment. Escape rooms are interactive team games where players must collect clues, work together to solve puzzles, and complete challenges in one or more rooms to achieve a particular objective in a certain amount of time. Here, there are significant factors including perceptions and engagement in relation to the students’ constructs about a certain content and methodology. This study aims to evaluate how affects an escape room used to teach mathematical contents with students in terms of perceptions and engagement. For that, a qualitative analysis has been carried out in 10 students enrolled in a mathematic course of an education master’s degree. An 8-item survey was employed (open-ended questions) and the results were analyzed using the web-based data analysis software WebQDA. According to the findings, the perceptions and engagement of students after completing the escape room of mathematics were positive. Words such as interesting, fun, useful, important, or learning were extracted from the students’ answers. This result indicates a high degree of overall satisfaction with the escape room employed. Thus, escape room developed has several benefits in perceptions and engagement of students towards mathematics contents. Students also showed preferences towards certain tasks of the escape room. This helps to evaluate and improve the proposed escape room in its application in further academic courses.

Keywords:

Escape Room, Mathematics Education, Qualitative Analysis, Gamification, Perception and Engagement.