Abstract:

Escape rooms are a new type of leisure activity in which teams of players follow clues in order to solve puzzles with the aim of accomplishing a specific goal (usually escaping from a room) in a limited amount of time. These activities have drawn the attention of educators due to their ability to foster teamwork, leadership, creative thinking, and communication in a way that is engaging for students. As a consequence, educational escape rooms are emerging as a new type of learning activity. Educational escape rooms are “escape rooms that include part of the course materials within their puzzles in such a way that students are required to master these materials in order to solve the puzzles and succeed in the escape room”.

Despite there is a dearth of research on educational escape rooms due to the novelty of this concept, different researchers have reported on the high praise received from students after conducting this sort of activities in the classroom. Prior works agree that educational escape rooms demand a great effort on the part of instructors, not only when designing and building the activity, but also when the time comes to conduct it. The latter is especially challenging in large-enrollment courses, in which it becomes infeasible to monitor all the students and provide them with the assistance they need. Although previous works have presented tools to ease the creation of educational puzzle-like games, no previous study has reported on the use of a platform for managing educational escape rooms that would help teachers overcome the barriers they face when trying to incorporate these activities into their teaching.

This work aims to identify and analyse the requirements that should be taken into account when developing a platform for managing educational escape rooms. The requirement elicitation was based on past educational escape room experiences conducted by the authors and other experiences reported in the literature, which provided a comprehensive view of the distinctive characteristics that these activities have in comparison with other game-based approaches. The set of requirements gathered cover all the main aspects of conducting an educational escape room: integration of the activity into the virtual learning environment of the course, student registration, team creation, control of activity execution (management of game elements, resources, and narrative events during the activity), progress monitoring, hint management, assessment of the activity, and gathering of student feedback and data on learning effectiveness. These requirements will serve as a starting point for the development of a platform that facilitates instructors’ work when conducting educational escape rooms, reducing the time investment, and thus contributing to the popularization of these learning activities in educational contexts.

Keywords:

Educational Escape Rooms, Gamification, Educational Software.