A Hybrid Escape Room to Foster Motivation and Programming Education for Pre-Service Teachers

Educational escape rooms aims to motivate students, to strengthen knowledge and evaluate learning. Pre-service teachers enrolled in “Computer Science and Digital Competency” course shows lack of motivation and difficulties to realise its usefulness in everyday practice, becoming an ideal context to apply this strategy. 157 students belonging to a European university participated in the experience as case study. The educational escape room was conducted following a hybrid model, mixing a physical organization of props with a virtual organization of the narrative, tests and achievements. The experiment was designed to answer two hypotheses, first if applying escape room as an educational strategy fosters pre-primary and primary students' motivation, since this method address complex concepts in a practical way, and second, if the application of this strategy as teaching strategy makes students perceive the learning process as a game.