Hint Strategies in Educational Escape Rooms: A Process Mining Approach

Abstract

Educational escape rooms have become a useful tool for teachers who want to engage their students and attract their attention to the content taught. Also, they have been found to be valuable in improving learner outcomes, perceptions, and engagement in higher education. Although much attention has been placed on students’ opinions when playing educational escape rooms, not much attention has been placed on the importance of the design process, and little research has investigated the effectiveness of hint strategies in optimizing participant experiences and learning outcomes. In this study, and through a process mining approach, we will determine the hints strategies of four online educational escape rooms at the university level. The games were designed with the software Escapp, which allows researchers to collect students’ trace log data during the escape rooms. With this data, we calculated descriptive statistics for each escape room, studied the relationship between hints and performance, and to take into account the temporal aspect of students’ actions, we employed process mining to investigate the transitions between actions and the role of hints in helping students solve the puzzles. Results show that the use of hints was generally low and that participants relied more on their own problem-solving skills. However, there were instances in which hints were requested and correlated with longer gameplay duration and a higher number of failed attempts. In conclusion, the present study addresses a gap in the existing literature which highlights, after our analysis, the need for careful consideration of hint design and delivery strategies.

Keywords: educational escape rooms, hints, game-based learning, learning
analytics, process mining.