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 consist of escape rooms that incorporate course materials within their puzzles in such a way that students are required to master these materials in order to succeed. Although several studies have reported on the use of escape rooms in a wide range of disciplines, prior research falls short of addressing the use of educational escape rooms for teaching programming, one of the most valuable skills of the twenty-first century that students often have difficulties grasping. This paper reports on the use of an educational escape room in a programming course at a higher education institution and provide, for the first time, insights on the instructional effectiveness of using educational escape rooms for teaching programming. The results of this paper show that appropriate use of educational escape rooms can have significant positive impacts on student engagement and learning in programming courses. These results also suggest that students prefer these activities over traditional computer laboratory sessions. Finally, another novel contribution of this paper is a set of recommendations and proposals for educators in order to help them create effective educational escape rooms for teaching programming.

Contribution: This article provides evidence on the effectiveness of game-based learning (GBL) for computer science education when using educational video games created by teachers using authoring tools. Background: Although teacher-oriented authoring tools for creating educational video games can help overcome the main barriers hampering the use and uptake of GBL, there is a lack of studies examining the effectiveness of educational video games authored by teachers using these authoring tools by means of rigorous scientific methods. Research Questions: Is GBL using teacher-authored games more effective than traditional teaching in terms of motivation for computer science students? Is GBL using teacher-authored games more effective than traditional teaching in terms of knowledge acquisition for computer science students? Methodology: Two randomized control trials with pretest, post-test, and one questionnaire were conducted to compare the effectiveness of traditional teaching and GBL in two computer science courses. The sample of the two experiments was composed by 75 and 49 students, respectively. Half of the students attended a traditional lecture, while the other half learned solely by playing teacher-authored educational video games. Findings: The results show that GBL using teacher-authored games was practically as effective as traditional teaching in terms of knowledge acquisition, but that it was emphatically successful in increasing student motivation. Students who learned by playing educational video games found the experience more motivating and fun than their counterparts, and a vast majority of them preferred the GBL approach over traditional teaching.

Contribution: This article compares the effectiveness for online software engineering education of video-based learning and game-based learning using teacher-authored educational video games created by using authoring tools. Background: Although substantial research has evaluated the impact of video-based and game-based learning versus traditional teaching approaches, little research has been done comparing the effectiveness of video-based learning and video game-based learning. Furthermore, the few studies that performed this comparison did not compare the effectiveness for online education or examined teacher-authored video games. Research Questions: Is game-based learning using teacher-authored video games more effective than video-based learning in terms of knowledge acquisition for software engineering students in online settings? Is game-based learning using teacher-authored video games more effective than video-based learning in terms of motivation for software engineering students in online settings? Methodology: A quasi-experimental design with control and experimental groups and pre- and post-tests was employed. A total of 180 software engineering students participated in this study, 81 of which belonged to the control group while the other 99 were part of the experimental group. The students in the control group took an online lesson in which they learned exclusively by watching videos, whereas the students in the experimental group took the same lesson but learned exclusively by playing an educational video game created by a teacher through an authoring tool. Findings: The results show that game-based learning using teacher-authored educational video games was more effective than video-based learning in terms of both knowledge acquisition and motivation.

With the rise of distance learning, new challenges have emerged for educators. Among these challenges, developing effective and motivating group activities for students in the remote classroom is one of the top priorities to be addressed. According to existing literature, educational escape rooms have proven to be engaging and effective learning activities when conducted face-to-face. However, no prior research has analyzed the instructional effectiveness of these activities when they are conducted remotely. Furthermore, none of the educational escape rooms reported in the literature has been designed for teaching software modeling. This article analyzes an educational escape room conducted remotely in a software engineering fundamentals course for teaching software modeling. A total of three evaluation instruments were used: a pre-test and a post-test to measure students’ learning gains, a questionnaire to collect students’ perceptions, and a web platform for automatically gathering data on students’ interactions. The contribution of this article is two-fold. On the one hand, it provides, for the first time, evidence that remote educational escape rooms can be effective learning activities. On the other hand, it provides, also for the first time, proof that educational escape rooms are effective and engaging activities for teaching software modeling.

In recent years, educational escape rooms have started to gain momentum in the academic community. Prior research has reported on the use of educational escape rooms in several fields. However, earlier works have failed to assess the impact of this sort of activities for teaching programming in terms of learning effectiveness. This work fills the existing gap in the literature by examining an educational escape room for teaching programming in a higher education setting by means of three different instruments: (1) a pre-test and a post-test for measuring learning gains, (2) a survey for assessing students' perceptions, and (3) a web platform for recording student interaction data during the activity. The results of this work provide, for the first time, empirical evidence that educational escape rooms are an effective and engaging way of teaching programming.

Learning analytics methods have proven useful in providing insights from the increasingly available digital data about students in a variety of learning environments, including serious games. However, such methods have not been applied to the specific context of educational escape rooms and therefore little is known about students' behavior while playing. The present work aims to fill the gap in the existing literature by showcasing the power of learning analytics methods to reveal and represent students' behavior when participating in a computer-supported educational escape room. Specifically, we make use of sequence mining methods to analyze the temporal and sequential aspects of the activities carried out by students during these novel educational games. We further use clustering to identify different player profiles according to the sequential unfolding of students' actions and analyze how these profiles relate to knowledge acquisition. Our results show that students' behavior differed significantly in their use of hints in the escape room and resulted in differences in their knowledge acquisition levels.