EvscApp: Evaluating the Pedagogical Relevance of Educational Escape Games for Computer Science

While there is consensus that educational escape games have a beneficial impact on student learning in computer science, this hypothesis is not empirically demonstrated because the evaluation methods used by researchers in the field are carried out in an ad hoc manner, lack reproducibility and often rely on confidential samples. We introduce EvscApp, a standard methodology for evaluating educational escape games intended for the learning of computer science at the undergraduate level. Based on a state of the art in the realm of educational escape games and on the different associated pedagogical approaches existing in the literature, we arrive at a general-purpose experimental process divided in fifteen steps. The evaluation criteria used for assessing an escape game’s efficiency concern the aspects of motivation, user experience and learning. The EvscApp methodology has been implemented as an open source Web dashboard that helps researchers to carry out structured experimentations of educational escape games designed to teach computer science. The tool allows designers of educational computer escape games to escape the ad hoc construction of evaluation methods while gaining in methodological rigor and comparability. All the results collected through the experiments carried out with EvscApp are scheduled to be compiled in order to be able to rule empirically as to the pedagogical effectiveness of pedagogical escape games for computer science in general. A few preliminary experiments indicate positive early results of the method.