Introducing an Online Escape Room to Enhance Students' Database Concepts

Keywords: Escape Room, Database Course, E-Learning, Computing Education, Problem Solving, ER Diagram, Normalization, SQL

Introduction

The twenty-first century witnessed an exponential growth in digital development (Magreñán et al. 2022). These digital developments also influence the way teaching -learning process is implemented in the classrooms. Moreover, the pandemic era during the recent years also emphasized that technology can play a vital role in the teaching-learning process. Furthermore, the current students are considered as ‘digital natives’ (Tran et al. 2020) and they tend to be very comfortable with technology-supported classrooms. Escape room activities, e-learning applications (Ghalia et al., 2022; Iqbal and Coldwell, 2017), chatbots (Ashfaque et al., 2023; Waseem et al., 2023; Sohail et al., 2022) and mobile devices-supported learning (Iqbal et al., 2013) can also play a vital role in this process.

Nicholson (2015) explained that “escape rooms are live-action team-based games where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal (usually escaping from the room) in a limited amount of time”. Escape room activities were introduced in Japan in 2007 (Corkill, 2009) and with the passage of time, now it is popular all over the world. Ambrožová and Kaliba (2021) discussed that escape rooms should be collaborative, active, time-constrained, and problem-based to promote learning. Moreover, they argued that online escape games have a few limitations (in the sense of collaboration and direct contact) as compared to classical escape games.

This study prepared and introduced online escape rooms in the teaching-learning process of a database course. The purpose of these online escape rooms is to enhance problem solving skills, motivation, and engagement of database students. A survey was conducted with the database students to collect their feedback regarding the online escape rooms in their learning process. Moreover, final grades of two database groups were compared to assess the impact of online escape rooms on students’ learning.

The remaining paper is divided into different sections. It starts with the literature review section and then research design and methodology. The educational online escape rooms are explained, and the results are presented. The next sections provide discussion and findings of the study.

Literature Review

Makri et al. (2021) discussed that escape room activities can be considered as an instructional strategy which enhances students’ classroom learning experience and promotes learner-focused approach. Furthermore, Lopez-Pernas et al. (2019) mentioned that educational escape rooms also have the ability to foster creative thinking, leadership, teamwork, and communication among participants. Moffett and Cassidy (2023) explained that educators used educational escape rooms to promote learner motivation and support skill development. Escape room activities have already been introduced in different academic fields, such as mathematics (Fuentes-Cabrera et al., 2020), computer science (Lathwesen & Belova 2021; Lopez-Pernas et al., 2019), physics (Vörös & Sárközi, 2017), nursing (Brown et al., 2019), learning for foreign languages (Stollhans, 2020), chemistry (Ang et al., 2020), and pharmacy (Baker et al. 2020).