Analyzing Learning Effectiveness and Students Perceptions of an Educational Escape Room in a Programming Course in Higher Education

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.