JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The Corona pandemic outbreak has led to a sudden change in education, closing schools and shifting to online teaching, which has become an enormous challenge for teachers and students. Implementing adequate online pedagogical approaches and integrating different digital tools in the teaching process has become a priority in educational systems. Finding a way to keep students' interest and persistence for learning is an important issue that online education is facing. One possible way to establish engaging and interactive learning environments, utilizing the energy and enthusiasm of students for educational purposes, is the use of game-based learning activities and gamification of different parts of educational process.

Objective:

This paper presents a use case of migrating an escape room style educational game into an online environment by using design thinking methodology. We wanted to show that design thinking methodology is useful to create engaging and motivating online games that provide educational value.

Methods:

Starting from students’ perspective we have created a simple digital escape room style game where students had an opportunity to self-assess their knowledge in computer science at their own pace. Students tested this prototype game and their opinion about the game was collected through an online survey. The test's goal was to evaluate the students' perceptions about the implemented digital educational escape room style game and gather information on whether it could provide students' engagement in learning computer science during online teaching.

Results:

117 students from sixth and seventh grades filled the survey regarding the achieved students’ engagement. Despite the differences in students’ answers about game complexity and puzzles' difficulty, most students liked the activity (M = 4.75, SD = 0.67 on scale from 1 to 5). They had enjoyed the game, and they would like to participate in this kind of activity again (M = 4.74, SD = 0.68). All students (100% of them) found the digital escape room educational game interesting for playing and learning.

Conclusions:

The results confirmed that digital escape room games could be used as an educational tool to engage students in the learning process and achieve learning outcomes. Furthermore, the design thinking methodology proved to be a useful tool in the process of adding novel educational value to the digital escape room game.