Abstract:

Educational escape rooms are teaching tools increasingly used in higher education with satisfactory results. We have developed a digital educational escape room entitled “Alimental, querido Watson" for the “Alimentación y Dietética” subject (Nutrition and Dietetics), which is an elective subject for the Medical degree at the University of Valencia.

The main objective of this activity is that students, with the excuse of solving a mysterious case together with Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson, review the theoretical-practical contents of the subject while having fun.

A pilot study of our escape room was carried out in the 2020/2021 academic year. The different rooms and puzzles were designed using encrypted pdf documents and online locks. The results of this non-compulsory activity showed that the students who participated in the escape room obtained higher marks in the exam. In addition, the level of satisfaction with this pilot experience was very high.

In view of such good results, in the academic year 2021/2022 we consolidated the activity including several improvements:
1) The teachers of the subject, characterized as Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson, filmed introductory videos to each puzzle in order to facilitate the immersion of the students in the activity
2) The role of Dr. Watson was played by a woman to introduce the gender perspective
3) The entire escape room was implemented in the virtual classroom of the subject, making the activity easily exportable to other courses/degrees, as long as they use the same system (Moodle).

The students have once again shown their satisfaction with the activity, which they consider useful for reviewing the concepts of the subject (82.9 % of the students) and fun (95.1 % of the students). They also value very positively the work and the involvement of the professors in the preparation of the case to be solved and the videos recorded. On the other hand, the students who participated in the pilot escape room the previous academic year, were invited to also participate in this new edition. All of them considered that the improvements carried out in this new escape room, and especially the new video features, made the activity much better.

The results of "Alimental, querido Watson" confirm the benefits of the use of this teaching tool in the subject of “Alimentación y Dietética”, as well as the potential of educational escape rooms to boost student motivation and performance in university science degrees.

Keywords:

Gamification, Virtual educational escape room, Nutrition, Dietetics, Medicine.