Exploring escape games as a teaching tool in educational robotics

Giang, Christian, Chevalier, Morgane, Negrini, Lucio, Peleg, Ran, Bonnet, Evgeniia, Piatti, Alberto and Mondada, Francesco (2020) Exploring escape games as a teaching tool in educational robotics. Moro, Michele, Alimisis, Dimitris and Iocchi, Luca (eds.) In EDUROBOTICS 2018 : International Conference Educational Robotics 2018. vol. 946, Springer. pp. 95-106 . (doi:10.1007/978-3-030-18141-3_8).

Abstract

In the past years, educational escape games have raised interest in researchers and educators as a new game-based learning approach to break out from the traditional classroom routine. Recent work has demonstrated that educational escape games elicit high motivation and engagement on the part of the participants. Moreover, it has been shown that many participants experienced flow, a state of mind, which has been considered as beneficial for successful learning. However, due to its novelty, studies on the educational significance of such activities still appear to be sparse. In this work, we investigated whether escape games can be used as a teaching tool in the context of educational robotics, since both can be situated in the pedagogical currents of social-constructivism. To this end, we developed a prototype of an escape game using the educational robot Thymio and the visual programming language VPL and tested it with 61 subjects. Both quantitative and qualitative results showed that most participants highly appreciated the activity and agreed on the game’s usability for teaching. Moreover, a great majority agreed on having experienced flow while playing. We, therefore, suggest that escape games provide a favorable framework for educational robotic activities, promoting particularly self-regulated and collaborative learning.

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Contributors

Author: Ran Peleg

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