Contribution to the understanding, creation and conduction of technology-enhanced educational escape rooms

Resumo

In addition to being a well-liked form of recreation, escape rooms 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 under the promise of enhancing students' learning through highly engaging experiences. These activities, which combine some of the key principles of game design with sound learning approaches, consist of escape rooms that require students to master field-specific knowledge and skills in order to solve their puzzles and succeed in the activity. Although several studies have reported on the use of educational escape rooms in a wide range of disciplines, prior research falls short of addressing whether these novel activities can be effective for learning computer science topics. This thesis examines the use of several educational escape rooms for teaching computer science topics in different scenarios, including computer science courses covering programming and software engineering fundamentals as well as face-to-face and remote settings. This thesis also encompasses the design, implementation and evaluation of Escapp, a software platform for aiding educators in the cumbersome task of conducting engaging and effective face-to-face and remote educational escape rooms, contributing this way to overcome some of the main barriers hampering the adoption of educational escape rooms. The results reported in this thesis contribute to the understanding of educational escape rooms by showing that these activities can be engaging and effective when used for teaching computer science topics, both when they are conducted face-to-face as well as when they are conducted remotely. In this regard, the results also suggest that, although remote educational escape rooms can be as engaging as their face-to-face counterparts, their learning effectiveness is somewhat lower. Finally, this thesis provides evidence that the proposed Escapp platform is a well-suited solution for conducting effective face-to-face and remote educational escape rooms.