Compelling evidence points to the fact that training media consumers, especially young people, in media literacy is critical for addressing global risks linked to mis/disinformation and cognitive manipulation. Insights from previous research on media literacy training suggest that educational escape rooms (EERs) can be an effective way to deliver such training. However, the use of these novel game-based learning activities for media literacy training has not been systematically reviewed before. This article aims to review the existing literature on EERs for media literacy to synthesise current practices as well as existing evidence of their effectiveness. The following aspects were analysed for each study included in the review: learning objectives, media literacy areas and platforms; EER characteristics (storyline, goal, puzzles, format, delivery, duration and support) and research design aspects (context, sample, research aims, findings, evaluation methods and recommendations). Our findings indicate that EERs hold significant potential for developing media literacy competencies, particularly in areas of understanding and reflection. However, they also suggest that the design and evaluation of these activities require further refinement to fully realise their educational potential across media literacy areas. Moreover, the findings indicate that EERs should be accompanied by other forms of instruction to be truly effective.

Escape rooms have evolved from recreational activities to engaging educational tools, combining storytelling, puzzle-solving, and teamwork. Despite their popularity, research on escape rooms remains highly decentralized with no clear focus or pathway. To shed some light on this growing field, this study analyzes 1051 published articles on escape rooms using natural language processing, specifically keyword analysis and structured topic modeling. Our study addresses four key research questions related to commonly used phrases, research topics, the evolution of these topics, and their interconnections. We identified 24 distinct topics categorized into design and development, field of application, participants, and technology. The analysis reveals an almost exclusive focus on educational applications (>90%), particularly in healthcare and STEM education, highlighting soft skills and practical knowledge development. Based on our findings, we provide a research agenda where we highlight future research opportunities, which include expanding research methods, incorporating generative artificial intelligence, and easing the barriers to adoption for teachers.

This article presents and assesses the integration of an artificial intelligence (AI) agent into an educational escape room conducted in four different higher education courses on databases. The AI agent, implemented as a web-based chatbot using the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer)-4o-mini model, was integrated through an open source platform to provide escape room participants with adaptive, process-oriented hints and support. A total of 148 students participated in this study. Results show that students positively valued the AI agent’s usefulness and ease of use, reporting that it helped them progress and reduce frustration. Performance data indicated fewer predefined hint requests and more efficient problem-solving compared to a previous edition of the same escape room without the agent. This study highlights the potential of AI agents as pedagogical assistants that foster engagement and autonomy in game-based learning activities.

This article presents a systematic literature review on escape rooms as a didactic tool for teaching and learning programming. The review examined the programming topics and languages addressed, the educational levels targeted, evaluation methods used and key design elements such as format, duration, location and narrative structure. Methodological quality was assessed using the MMAT and GRADE frameworks to determine the strength and reliability of the included studies. Findings indicate that while educational escape rooms show strong potential to support programming education through active, experiential learning, the current body of research is relatively small and still developing. The topics covered included basic programming concepts, web development and data analysis. Most escape rooms were implemented in higher education contexts and delivered in various formats (physical, fully virtual or hybrid), often incorporating digital tools and physical elements to enhance immersion. Although motivational and engagement benefits were consistently reported across studies, the majority relied heavily on post‐activity perception surveys for evaluation. Only a few studies used more objective assessments such as pre/post‐tests or learning analytics. Notably, no study included delayed post‐tests or longitudinal follow‐ups, and only a small number explored teamwork, collaboration or problem‐solving strategies in depth. Consequently, the overall certainty of evidence on measurable learning outcomes remains low to moderate. Rationale for this study: Learning programming is challenging, and traditional teaching often falls short. Game‐based learning, particularly educational escape rooms, may help, yet no prior review has focused on programming. Why the new findings matter: This study shows escape rooms boost engagement and motivation, though current research remains small‐scale, beginner‐focused, and methodologically weak, limiting evidence of lasting learning impact. Implications for researchers and educational institutions: For educators, escape rooms provide a promising and adaptable method for teaching programming and teamwork skills, but they must be firmly grounded in established learning theories, embedded into curricula, and evaluated through robust mixed‐methods approaches. Researchers should extend the scope beyond introductory content to include advanced topics, a wider range of learner demographics and long‐term outcomes that assess retention and skill transfer. Policy‐makers and funders can help scale these initiatives by investing in educator training, developing accessible design tools and fostering cross‐institutional collaborations. Such efforts will ensure escape rooms are inclusive, evidence‐based and capable of delivering meaningful, sustainable learning impacts.

Educators have shown growing interest in escape rooms, as they engage students while fostering teamwork, leadership, creativity, and communication. Consequently, educational escape rooms are emerging as a novel form of learning activity that seeks to enhance students’ learning through immersive and highly engaging experiences. This paper presents a novel approach to designing reusable educational puzzles within Unity and integrating them seamlessly into the Escapp platform for creating educational escape rooms, as part of the IGLUE project. We describe the workflow that enables educators to configure customizable puzzle instances via Escapp’s interface—each instance accessible through a unique URL that exposes configuration data in JSON format. Four distinct Unity puzzles have been developed according to a flexible, parameter-driven architecture, enabling them to adapt dynamically based on educator-defined configurations. During runtime, the Unity game fetches the JSON data to instantiate and render the puzzle, while solution validation occurs via secure API communication with Escapp—puzzle attempts are sent back to the platform for validation, and correct solutions trigger automatic notifications of completion. This bidirectional integration supports modularity, reusability, and real-time feedback and learning analytics, enhancing the design of escape room-style learning scenarios in a scalable and extensible way.

Making research advances available to the community in the shape of opensource software has the potential to introduce cutting-edge innovations from early on, foster collaborative development, and revolutionize industrial applications. However, including open source software resulting from a research project as part of a production system poses some risks and must be evaluated in detail, considering all pros and cons. This is especially delicate when that piece of software is in charge of authentication and authorization. This article reports on an experience of integrating open source identity and access management (IAM) software that is the result of multiple research projects, the FIWARE Key rock IAM, into three educational web-based platforms: two learning object repositories and a course management platform. We intend to draw the lessons learned from this experience so they can guide software practitioners when deciding if they should integrate open source soft ware developed in research projects.

Learning about databases is indispensable for individuals studying software engineering or computer science or those involved in the IT industry. We analyzed a remote educational escape room for teaching about databases in four different higher education courses in two consecutive academic years. We employed three instruments for evaluation: a pre- and posttest to assess the escape room’s effectiveness for student learning, a questionnaire to gather students’ perceptions, and a Web platform that unobtrusively records students’ interactions and performance. We show novel evidence that educational escape rooms conducted remotely can be engaging as well as effective for teaching about databases.

Contribution: This article analyzes the learning effectiveness of a virtual educational escape room for teaching software engineering and compares this activity with traditional teaching through a randomized controlled trial. Background: Educational escape rooms have been used across a wide variety of disciplines at all levels of education and they are becoming increasingly popular among teachers. Nevertheless, there is a clear general need for more robust empirical evidence on the learning effectiveness of these novel activities and, particularly, on their application in software engineering education. Research Questions: Is game-based learning using educational escape rooms more effective than traditional lectures for teaching software engineering? What are the perceptions of software engineering students toward game-based learning using educational escape rooms? Methodology: The study presented in this article is a randomized controlled trial with a pre-and post-test design that was completed by a total of 326 software engineering students. The 164 students belonging to the experimental group learned software modeling by playing an educational escape room whereas the 162 students belonging to the control group learned the same subject matter through a traditional lecture. Findings: The results of the randomized controlled trial show that the students who learned software modeling through the educational escape room had very positive perceptions toward this activity, significantly increased their knowledge, and outperformed those students who learned through a traditional lecture in terms of knowledge acquisition.

Producing high-quality educational videos usually requires a large budget as it involves the use of expensive recording studios, the presence of a technician during the entire recording session and often post-production tasks. The high costs associated with video production represent a major hindrance for many educational institutions and, thus, many teachers regard high-quality video recording as inaccessible. As a remedy to this situation, this article presents SAGA (Autonomous Advanced Recording Studio in its Spanish acronym), a low-cost autonomous recording set that allows teachers to produce educational content in video format in an agile way and without the need for post-production. The article provides an overview of SAGA, including a description of its hardware and software so that anyone with basic technical knowledge can replicate and operate the system. SAGA has been used to record more than 1,500 videos including the contents of six MOOCs hosted on the MiriadaX platform, as well as four courses at UPM. SAGA has been evaluated in two ways: (1) from the video producers’ perspective, it was evaluated with a questionnaire based on the Technology Acceptance Model, and (2) from the video consumers’ perspective, a questionnaire was conducted among MOOC participants to assess the perceived technical quality of the videos recorded with SAGA. The results show a very positive general opinion of the SAGA system, the recorded videos and the technical features thereof. Thus, SAGA represents a good opportunity for all those educational institutions and teachers interested in producing high-quality educational videos at a low cost.

Learning analytics dashboards are the main vehicle for providing educators with a visual representation of data and insights related to teaching and learning. Recent research has found that the data visualizations provided by dashboards are often very basic and do not take advantage of the latest research advances to analyze and depict the learning process. In this article, we present a success story of how we adapted a visualization used for research purposes for its integration in a dashboard for its use by teachers in daily practice. Specifically, we described the process of transforming and integrating a static sequence analysis visualization into an interactive web visualization in a learning analytics dashboard for monitoring students' temporal trajectories in educational escape rooms in real time. We interviewed teachers to find out how they made use of the dashboard and present a qualitative content analysis of their responses.

Making research advances available to the community in the shape of open source software has the potential to introduce cutting-edge innovations from early on, foster collaborative development, and revolutionize industrial applications. However, including open source software resulting from a research project as part of a production system poses some risks and must be evaluated in detail, considering all pros and cons. This is especially delicate when that piece of software is in charge of authentication and authorization. This article reports on an experience of integrating open source identity and access management (IAM) software that is the result of multiple research projects, the FIWARE Keyrock IAM, into three educational web-based platforms: two learning object repositories and a course management platform. We intend to draw the lessons learned from this experience so they can guide software practitioners when deciding if they should integrate open source software developed in research projects.

Educational escape rooms have gained recognition as immersive and engaging learning activities. While existing research has primarily focused on students’ perceptions and learning outcomes, little attention has been paid to students’ performance, behavior, and interactions during these activities. This study aims to fill this gap by using person-centered methods to analyze students’ gameplay data from a computer-based educational escape room. Using Gaussian mixture models, we identified four distinct profiles of players using their gameplay data: efficient players who complete the game smoothly with little help, supported players who make good progress with the help of hints, relentless players who devote their time to seeking help rather than working on the escape room puzzles, and laggers who make little progress and fail to obtain the help they need. We further investigate the relationships between puzzle completion times and hint-requesting behavior using Bayesian Gaussian graphical models. The findings point to hints as the key to support players that may not easily complete the activity on their own. Lastly, we analyze the relationship between the identified profiles and knowledge acquisition during the escape room. We found that students’ initial and final knowledge differed by profile but learning gains were comparable except for the laggers.

Numerous initiatives were conducted online during the COVID-19 pandemic, and today it is necessary to analyze whether it is better to continue conducting these initiatives online, or should they be done face-to-face and even readapted to this format. This article compares an educational escape room for learning software engineering conducted online during the confinement caused by the pandemic and later face to face. The research involves 241 students and employs instruments to explore the knowledge acquisition attained by the students and their perceptions toward the activity. The results provide insights to consider use of this technique in the future. The digital elements used in a remote escape room are suitable for a face-to-face escape room since the educational efficacy of the activity was similar when conducted online and face to face. However, some students' perceptions related to enjoyment were worse in the face-to-face escape room, which could be improved by incorporating physical elements.

Las Jornadas de Innovación Educativa organizadas en la Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería de Sistemas Informáticos (ETSISI) de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) han sido un espacio clave para la reflexión y el intercambio de experiencias entre los docentes de nuestra escuela. A través de estas jornadas, no solo compartimos iniciativas innovadoras que estamos implementando en nuestras clases, sino que también nos enriquecemos mutuamente al ser fuente de inspiración para los demás, identificando nuevas estrategias pedagógicas y oportunidades de colaboración. Todo ello con la meta común de proporcionar a nuestros estudiantes experiencias educativas más enriquecedoras y adaptadas a las demandas del contexto actual. Durante el evento, se han presentado un total de trece trabajos que han sido agrupados en tres categorías principales: “Ludificación y aprendizaje basado en juegos”, donde se exploraron metodologías que fomentan la motivación y el compromiso a través del juego; “Aprendizaje potenciado mediante Inteligencia Artificial”, centrado en el uso de nuevas tecnologías basadas en Inteligencia Artificial para mejorar los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje; y “Aprendizaje basado en proyectos/retos, aprendizaje servicio y otros métodos activos de aprendizaje”, que promueven el aprendizaje práctico y colaborativo, conectando a los estudiantes con problemas y desafíos reales, en muchos casos de carácter social. Estas categorías reflejan el amplio abanico de metodologías activas que buscan transformar el proceso educativo, haciéndolo más dinámico, interactivo y centrado en el estudiante. Estamos muy satisfechos con la excelente acogida que han tenido las Jornadas de Innovación Educativa por parte del profesorado. La alta participación y el interés mostrado por los docentes han superado nuestras expectativas, lo que demuestra el creciente compromiso de la comunidad académica de la ETSISI con la mejora continua de la enseñanza. La gran asistencia, sumada a las enriquecedoras discusiones que se generaron, refleja no solo el entusiasmo por implementar nuevas metodologías, sino también el deseo de compartir conocimientos y experiencias para seguir avanzando juntos en la mejora de la calidad educativa.

Active learning methods are needed to promote student motivation and facilitate the development of technical and soft skills. Previous research in software engineering education shows that LEGO (R) Serious Play (LSP) fully aligns with these needs. However, prior works are usually based on insufficiently robust research methods that do not include a large sample, a variety of evaluation instruments, and/or rigorous comparative methods such as randomized controlled trials, which makes it difficult to obtain reliable and solid conclusions. This article presents an original LSP activity to teach software development life cycle models and core software engineering activities, tackling learning objectives different from those addressed by the LSP activities reported in prior works. The LSP activity was validated through a cluster-randomized controlled trial involving 217 computer science students. These students were divided into a control group that received a traditional lecture and an experimental group that performed the LSP activity. The research was supported by pre and post-tests that allowed the study of the knowledge attained by the students, as well as a questionnaire to gather students' perceptions. The results indicate that the students in the experimental group learned significantly more and were more motivated than their counterparts in the control group. This leads to the conclusion that LSP-based activities such as the one reported in this article are highly effective in terms of knowledge acquisition and motivation to teach some software engineering topics compared to traditional lectures.

Significant research work has been undertaken related to the game-based learning approach over the last years. However, a closer look at this work reveals that further research is needed to examine some types of game-based learning approaches such as virtual reality serious games and LEGO Serious Play. This article examines and compares the effectiveness for learning Scrum and related agile practices of a serious game based on virtual reality and a learning activity based on the LEGO Serious Play methodology. The presented study used a quasi-experimental design with two groups, pre- and post-tests, and a perceptions questionnaire. The sample was composed of 59 software engineering students, 22 of which belonged to group A, while the other 37 were part of group B. The students in group A played the virtual reality serious game, whereas the students in group B conducted the LEGO Serious Play activity. The results show that both game-based learning approaches were effective for learning Scrum and related agile practices in terms of learning performance and motivation, but they also show that the students who played the virtual reality serious game outperformed their peers from the other group in terms of learning performance.

This research-to-practice full paper describes a case study conducted at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieria de Sistemas Informaticos at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, within the subject of Software Engineering Fundamentals. In this study, physical rewards, called MeriCOINs, were introduced as a way to gamify the subject. These rewards were progressively awarded to incentivize students throughout the course. These MeriCOINs were given as prizes within educational games and multiple-choice exam simulations presented as contests through the Wooclap tool. Students could use these MeriCOINs as part of the course process for queue advancement and late submissions. A notable improvement in student motivation and performance was achieved according to the perceptions of both students and teachers. A process for manufacturing and editing MeriCOINs using sustainable and low-cost processes was designed, which not only allow for easy and inexpensive implementation of the rewards but also establish them as a valid educational approach that can be replicated in different courses and contexts.

This article presents a bot aimed at helping massive open online course participants complete programming assignments by providing them with timely formative feedback. Students’ perceptions toward the bot were positive and statistics indicate that many relied on it to complete assignments.

Learning analytics methods have proven useful in providing insights from the increasingly available digital data about students in a variety of learning environments, including serious games. However, such methods have not been applied to the specific context of educational escape rooms and therefore little is known about students' behavior while playing. The present work aims to fill the gap in the existing literature by showcasing the power of learning analytics methods to reveal and represent students' behavior when participating in a computer-supported educational escape room. Specifically, we make use of sequence mining methods to analyze the temporal and sequential aspects of the activities carried out by students during these novel educational games. We further use clustering to identify different player profiles according to the sequential unfolding of students' actions and analyze how these profiles relate to knowledge acquisition. Our results show that students' behavior differed significantly in their use of hints in the escape room and resulted in differences in their knowledge acquisition levels.

Today, there is a great variety of learning techniques and methodologies: traditional lectures, role-plays, group dynamics, project-based learning, simulations, educational games, and so on. Regarding technology-enhanced learning, the educational usage of virtual reality is innovative and the initiatives carried out suggest that this technology is an appealing medium for young people that facilitates an active and effective teaching. On the other hand, agile methodologies are widely spread across the IT industry and it is necessary to look for the best techniques to learn them in the most appropriate way. This contribution presents a virtual reality serious video game, named ScrumVR, which aims to teach the key aspects of the most widespread agile methodology for software development: Scrum. To do so, this video game tries to gets players closer to their first weeks of work within a Scrum team. The empirical results, gathered through a case study conducted with 78 software engineering students and supported by instruments, such as prepost tests and questionnaires, indicate that ScrumVR facilitates the learning of the roles, meetings, artifacts, and practices employed in Scrum, and contributes to enhance student's motivation and the whole learning experience.