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Implementing an Educational Escape Room to increase student motivation to
participate in extracurricular activities
Hannes Birnkammerer & Patrick Urlbauer
Presented at „Tag der Lehre / Konferenz Inverted Classroom and Beyond 2024“, UAS St.
Pölten, 13 to 14 February 2024; Shorter version published on the Conference Blog:
https://tagderlehre.fhstp.ac.at/beitraege/implementing-an-educational-escape-room-to-
increase-student-motivation-to-participate-in-extracurricular-activities
Lead/Teaser: The University of Passau uses DiLabEscape, an extracurricular
educational escape room (EER), to give students the opportunity to reflect on their
digitalization-related skills. The article presents the results of an action research
project that analyzes the EER's advertising measures.
Introduction
Digitalization is changing the teaching profession and thus also poses the challenge
of introducing digitalization-related skills in the university phase of teacher education
in order to enable future teachers to act competently themselves and to initiate
media-critical, reflective educational processes among pupils (van Ackeren et al.,
2019). However, research indicates that, despite existing support efforts, teacher
education students do not consider themselves to be sufficiently competent in
dealing with digital media (Rubach & Lazarides, 2019; longitudinal Zinn et al. 2022).
At the same time, they appear to have a low average motivation for digital offerings in
the area of teaching (Schmidt, Goertz, & Behrens, 2017), and there is little curricular
leeway for adressing corresponding media-related pedagogical skills in teacher
education. The University of Passau responded to this problem by offering
extracurricular and student-supported courses (Open DiLab Hours), among other
options, but in line with research, these were hardly ever attended (Althammer,
2022).
In order to increase students' motivation for such extracurricular activities, an
Educational Escape Room (EER) - a "live-action team-based game in which players
encounter challenges in order to complete a mission in a limited amount of time"
(Veldkamp et al., 2020) - was designed, tested and has been offered since winter
term 2023, giving students the opportunity to reflect on their digitalization-related
skills in an engaging and reflective way (Veldkamp et al., 2020; López-Pernas, 2023).
It is assumed that game-based formats increase students' motivation to participate in
extracurricular events (Ryan & Rigby, 2019).
This article examines the extent to which different advertising foci and measures had
an influence on students' motivation to register for the event.
Methods
Within the framework of an action research project, various advertising measures
were implemented: By billboarding, the EER was advertised as a game and with a
focus on remuneration; it was advertised in a central basic lecture and its associated
supplementary seminars and recalled with various emails; finally, an additional
billboarding campaign without specific focus was launched (see fig. 1 for an
illustration of the timeline). At the end of the game, participants were asked by
questionnaire about the various advertising measures and their attributed influences
on their own decision to participate in the EER. The response options ranged from 1
(very low attributed influence) to 5 (very high attributed influence) and an option that
the advertising measure was not perceived at all.
Fig.1. advertising measures & game registrations over time.
Results
The foci influencing the decision to participate in the EER that were attributed to the
respective advertising foci are shown in Tab. 1 and are summarized in Fig. 2.
Fig.2. advertising foci and their attributed influence (n=24)
Looking at the results for the different focal points of the advertising measures, it can
be seen that 66.7% of the responses attributed a high or very high influence on the
decision to participate in the format to advertising as a game-based format. In
contrast, 25.0% of the responses attributed a high or very high influence to the
remuneration. 37.5% of responses attributed a low or very low influence to the
remuneration on the decision to participate in the EER.
The influences on the decision to participate in the EER that were attributed to the
respective advertising measures can be seen in Fig. 3.
Fig.3. advertising measures and their attributed influence (n=24)
With regard to the results on different advertising measures, it can be seen that
advertising in the basic lecture and its accompanying seminars is assigned the
highest influence (66.7% of responses indicate a high or very high influence),
followed by personal recommendation by peers (54.2%). The advertising measures
without direct personal contact in the form of posters (37.5%), on the Stud.IP learning
management system (29.2%) and by direct message (8.4%) were assigned the
lowest values in comparison. Correspondingly, these measures are most frequently
assigned a low or very low influence on the motivation to participate in the
extracurricular EER. In addition, these three advertising measures also have the
highest proportion of responses stating that these forms of advertising were not
noticed at all (neutral posters 25.0%, Stud.IP 29.2% and direct message 37.5%).
Discussion & Limitations
The results of our action research project indicate, on the one hand, that the game-
based format had a favorable motivational effect on students' willingness to register
for this extracurricular offer. Contrary to our expectations, this advertising focus was
cited significantly more often as a decisive factor for participation than the
remuneration (66.7% vs. 25.0%). In our opinion, this result can be explained by the
very probable existence of a selection effect with regard to attributions of influence in
relation to the game-based format. Nevertheless, we consider the distance to the
attributed influence of one of the most typical forms of participant recruitment in
research (monetary remuneration) in the course of our action research project to be
an interesting result, in light of which we want to further develop the future advertising
concept.
On the other hand, we believe that one result with regards to the forms of advertising
measures is decisive for this, namely that the direct, personal approach - whether by
lecturers or peers - was rated by the participants as significantly more influential for
their own willingness to take up the extracurricular offer than the advertising
measures that referred to the offer without direct personal contact (66.7% and 54.2%
vs. 37.5%, 29.2% and 8.4%). For the further development of the advertising concept,
we therefore want to focus primarily on direct personal contact.
In the future, it should be empirically verified whether the results can be replicated.
Due to the small sample size, the significance of our findings is extremely limited and,
in our opinion, should only be seen as an impetus for further development within our
project and future research.
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