Abstract
This chapter examines three educational escape rooms applied in engineering courses in the specific area of computer networks. This analysis includes background, design decisions, implementation details, and obtained results. The objective is to provide a quick overview of ideas for teachers who want to initiate the field. Preliminary results seem promising in terms of student engagement and motivation, which is particularly relevant in online environments. The current literature indicates a trend about educational escape rooms during the last years, which will likely increase, while future research should focus on tools and resources to implement them and collaboration among professors to perform extensive evaluations in terms of learning outcomes.
TopIntroduction
Engineering degrees in higher education require a profound knowledge in basic sciences (such as mathematics and physics), but they also rely on very practical learning. In the end, engineers will work with daily problems and challenges, and their main objective is to solve them applying ideas and tools.
In the specific field of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), these tools and practical environments change every day. Although engineering foundations still remain the same, the speed of technological advances is very high; hence, professors need to catch up with industry requirements and trends, and to update the content of their courses every academic year. At the same time, this reality affects the methodology leveraged for teaching engineering, since traditional passive master classes tend to be inefficient to cover the syllabus, and that is why engineering courses usually implement active learning methods, in the form of practical laboratories, for students to test and develop their own knowledge (Balamuralithara & Woods, 2009).
Recently, other active learning methods, such as flipped classroom or gamification have been implemented in engineering courses in the ICT field of the Universidad de Alcala (UAH) (Estriegana et al., 2019), obtaining good results not only quantitatively as part of their final grades, but also when checking motivation and participation of students. In this regard, some professors of the ICT field in UAH wondered whether using escape rooms, as a complementary activity to these active learning methods, could eventually strengthen, even more, the good results obtained. The reason to do so is that escape rooms are indeed very similar to practical situations in engineering workplaces: a problem or a solution for a client needs to be found, and the engineers need to use any tools or resource available, together with their knowledge, to accomplish it (Gordillo et al., 2020).
The main objective of this chapter is to describe the design and implementation of three practical examples of escape rooms in computer science and telecommunication engineering courses in UAH. In particular, the courses belong to the field of computer networks. Our intention is to provide the foundational ideas, the design decisions, the resources needed to implement them and the obtained results, also taking into consideration changes and evolutions of it, as well as advantages and disadvantages.
The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: In the next section, the chapter reviews related work in the field of escape rooms in engineering. Afterwards, the three examples of escape rooms are described, each of them providing background, design decisions, implementations and results. This is followed with a section discussing the previous results, summarizing them, and providing general recommendations. Finally, the author provides future research directions and concludes the chapter.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Metaverse: A metaverse could be defined as a virtual world that simulates real environments with a particular focus on user immersion. Metaverses are usually created with virtual reality and/or augmented reality components.
Online/Virtual Teaching: Any type of teaching in which students and professor are not all physically present in the same location, or face-to-face. At the same time, online teaching can be synchronous (if when classes occur, professor and students are connected at the same time in an online session) or asynchronous (for example, if the professor records the classes and students watch them at their own pace). Additionally, hybrid modes of teaching (both online and face-to-face) could be implemented as well.
Computer Networks: The field of computer networks (sometimes also known as “telematics”) is a part of telecommunication engineering focused on services and protocols needed to facilitate communication among computers. This field includes topics like packet routing across Internet or even network security aspects.
Information and Communications Technology (ICT): The ICT term could be considered an extension of Information Technology (IT), with emphasis on communications (or telecommunications). Therefore, ICT involves any technological aspect in relation with information and communication.
Unreal Engine: 3D computer graphics game engine developed by the company Epic Games and one of the most popularly leveraged by industry nowadays.
Active Learning: Active learning could be considered a technique or methodology in education whose purpose is to actively involve students in their learning process, and with a particular focus on in-class learning.
Gamification: Gamification can refer to multiple aspects but, in the specific field of education it is a technique that mimics experiences from playing games (like scoreboards, badges, game dynamics, etc.) to implement them during class. The objective is to increase students’ engagement.
Flipped Classroom: Flipped classroom is one type of active learning methodology that consists of flipping the traditional timing for in-class and out-of-class activities. More specifically, instead of “passive” classes by professors that are later on practiced and studied by students at home, the idea is that students prepare the theoretical material in advance and use in-class time for practicing it.