Abstract:

We live in an ever-changing society. The educational context is no exception, and requires a renewal of paradigms. Profound changes to the role and function of the professor and the students are particularly vital. Active, cooperative and participative learning methodologies must be privileged, breaking with magisterial education and the mere transmission of knowledge.

The escape room is a game experience that challenges participants to leave a room where they are locked in. In order to reach the key to the exit door, players need to overcome a varied set of challenges. Following the increasingly recurrent adoption of gamification strategies in the teaching and learning processes, the educational escape room stems from this game experience and has students solving challenges in a team in real time. In educational escape rooms, players/students discover clues and solve mysteries, fulfilling different tasks in a room to learn in an active way.

Some of its benefits include improving student performance and motivation and fostering active learning.

In this paper, we present a case study on educational escape rooms used in the German class with a group of first-year Tourism students from a Portuguese higher education institution. Besides providing a motivating and challenging learning strategy, the aim of the escape room was to revise content taught in classes.

The aim of the study is to evaluate how escape rooms can contribute to increase students' motivation. A quantitative survey was conducted to gather information about students’ insights on the use of escape rooms.

Keywords:

Higher Education, Educational Escape Rooms, Game-Based Learning, Soft Skills, Language Learning, Tourism.