Codes and Ciphers: A Digital Escape Room for Secondary Schools (Practical Report)

Cryptography and data representation are computing topics that are included in many secondary school computing curricula. There is a wealth of learning objectives and associated tasks in the form of puzzles, small visualisations and experiments to challenge learners in these topics. However, the abundance of material can be overwhelming for both teachers and students. To address this issue in a motivating way, we developed, implemented and evaluated a digital Educational Escape Room (EER) with challenges that are well aligned with curricular learning objectives and typical game mechanics. We structured these challenges into four domains, thus integrating a total of 23 tasks into the EER. In order to explore the teachers’ perception and usage of our EER, we conducted a survey. 254 teachers participated, and their feedback indicates that our digital EER has achieved a wide reach within a few months, engaging 10, 002 students in challenges involving codes and ciphers. Teachers report that the scope of the EER is appropriate, that it substantially increases their students’ motivation and that it supports them in teaching the respective content. We also discuss (1) teachers’ opinions on the characteristics of our EER as noticed in their classrooms, such as support of educational concepts, ease of integration into their lesson structures, perceived impact on students, support for teachers, and (2) teachers’ ideas for adaptation and desirable improvements such as the organisation form of the accompanying workbook. Our findings provide an insight into teachers’ perspectives on EERs and thus inform other work in this area.