Design Thinking Methodology for Migration of Escape Room Style Educational Game in an Online Environment (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The Corona pandemic outbreak has led to a sudden change in education, closing schools and shifting the teaching online, 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 for establishing engaging and interactive learning environments, utilizing students’ energy and enthusiasm for educational purpose, is use of game-based learning activities and gamification of different parts of educational process. OBJECTIVE This paper presents how we have used design thinking methodology to migrate escape room style educational game in an online environment. We investigated whether digital educational escape room can be used to increase student engagement in remote teaching and online learning. We also investigate whether we can we design thinking to create an engaging escape room educational game and provide novel educational value for the escape room educational game. METHODS Using design thinking methodology, we managed to understand which game elements were considered most engaging by the students. Starting from students’ perspective we have created a simple digital escape room where students had an opportunity to self-assess their knowledge in computer science at their own pace. Students tested the prototype game and their opinion about the game was collected through an online survey. The test's main goal was not to measure students' achievement but to evaluate the students' perceptions of the implemented digital educational escape room style game and provide information on whether it could increase students' engagement in learning computer science. 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 have 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 escape room interesting for playing and learning. CONCLUSIONS The results confirmed that digital escape rooms could be used as a tool for increasing students' interest and motivation for achieving learning outcomes and gave us an insight in the elements that could be improved in the game.