A Model to Design Learning Escape Games: SEGAM

Gaëlle Guigon

, Jérémie Humeau

and Mathieu Vermeulen

1,2

IMT Lille Douai, Institut Mines Télécom, 941 Rue Charles Bourseul, Douai, France

UPMC, LIP6, Sorbonne Universités, 15 rue de la Sorbonne, Paris, France

Keywords:

Escape Game, Serious Game, Design, Motivation, Model.

Abstract:

This article proposes a methodology to design Serious Escape Games (SEG) for teaching. It describes, through

the proposed model, how to approach the various aspects related to this type of activity (constraints, pedagogy,

parameterization, tests, background, etc.). The goal of SEG is not only to reinforce the knowledge and skills

of students or to acquire them, but also to improve their intuition as to the choice of the skills to be mobilized

according to the different situations. This methodology was implemented through an experiment carried out as

part of a Masters combinatorial optimization course in an Engineering School, the aim of which was to increase

the attractiveness of this very complex discipline manipulating a large number of digits. The evaluation of this

experiment showed the advantages of this activity : manipulation of the notions in a playful way by the

learners, increase of the motivation and improvement of their reactivity and practical sense.

1 INTRODUCTION

"Once upon a time there was a world of students

and teachers, the world was once made of paper, ink,

feathers, blackboards and chalks. But recently, this

world changed and was invaded by barbaric tools."

This brief hook could introduce a serious game, a type

of Technology Enhanced Learing (TEL) to which

teachers are confronted. These serious games, like

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and ubiq-

uitous TEL are related to the digital and technologic

evolutions and impacted the teachers profession. But

the investment required for their design is still an im-

portant obstacle to the majority of them. Among these

TEL, serious games may be deﬁned as: "[...] a de-

vice, digital or not, whose initial intention is to com-

bine, with coherence, both serious aspects and play-

ful springs from games, videoludic or not." (Alvarez

et al., 2016) The design and / or production mod-

els and tools of serious games seem few in number

and generally require strong computer skills, making

their use complex. At the same time, the world of

purely playful games is constantly evolving. Since a

few months, the concept of Escape Game has arrived

and quickly acquired a certain notoriety. We deﬁne

an Escape Game (or Escape Room) as a multi-player

life-size escape game, which typically involves escap-

ing from a room or a succession of rooms in a limited

time (Borrego et al., 2017). To do this, a group of

players must ﬁnd and collect a number of clues and

objects in order to solve riddles.

This concept seems interesting to exploit. It pro-

poses to the players a challenge to take up and re-

quires the mutual aid and the cooperation of team

members to solve the riddles. This type of activity

seems suitable for us to be adapted in the form of a se-

rious game, which we will call Serious Escape Game

(SEG). The problem developed in this paper is to de-

ﬁne a model and methods to design serious games of

the type Escape Game (and therefore SEG) by involv-

ing teachers at all stages of the design. A ﬁrst experi-

ment was carried out and allowed the design of a SEG

for a session of a combinatorial optimization course

for an audience of engineering students of Masters.

2 MODEL

The idea of adapting Escape Games to teaching was

imagined at the end of 2015 to meet the needs of

teachers. Thus, the primary goal was to mobilize stu-

dents’ knowledge in a more attractive context. Other

objectives were also targeted like : encouraging stu-

dents to develop their intuition, or solving original

problems in a limited time. To respond to these objec-

tives while beneﬁting from the added value of the use

of games for educational purposes (active participa-

tion, implementation of the course, immediate feed-

Guigon, G., Humeau, J. and Vermeulen, M.

A Model to Design Learning Escape Games: SEGAM.

DOI: 10.5220/0006665501910197

In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2018), pages 191-197

ISBN: 978-989-758-291-2

191

back, interactions between group members and emo-

tional involvement), the need has been felt to deﬁne

a methodology to design SEG for teaching without

forgetting the intrinsic constraints of this type of de-

vice. Nonetheless, SEGs involve the "natural drivers

of learning": the game, environmental exploration,

and peer interactions (Alvarez et al., 2016), encour-

aging the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Af-

ter executing a state of the art showing that few Es-

cape Games are suitable for teaching (Dumont and

Nadam, 2016), we created the SEGAM (Serious Es-

cape GAme Model). To design this, we have taken

elements of the DISC model (an acronym for Do-

main, Interaction, Scenario, Context) proposed by

(Vermeulen et al., 2017) to produce role-playing seri-

ous games with steps. This model proposes a decom-

position of the serious game into levels and then into

independent case studies. For SEGAM, we have kept

the decomposition into levels and transposed the case

studies into riddles. These riddles can be exploited

separately, while keeping a narrative link, as in the

DISC model. We shall return to the narrative aspect

in the rest of this article. The different constitutive el-

ements (levels, riddles and clues) were organized ac-

cording to Figure 1.

Figure 1: Model diagram.

According to this model, a SEG is divided into

several levels, a level represents a stage of the game.

To pass from a level L to a level L + 1, it is necessary

to solve at least one riddle. Each level has at least one

associated riddle and several riddles of the same level

can be performed in parallel. Each riddle corresponds

to one or more educational objectives (diagnostic, for-

mative, summative or discovery of a notion). On the

other hand, an riddle is connected to one index at least

(called ’ mandatory ’), and can also be linked to ’ op-

tional ’ clues. Some clues can be used to solve sev-

eral riddles, so it is important to make each clue avail-

able before the ﬁrst riddle (whether mandatory or op-

tional). The possible area of distribution of the clues

is represented by the horizontal arrows in Figure 1.

When all the riddles of a level are solved, the learners

have the necessary means to reach the next level, un-

locking access to new clues. From this model, the

difﬁculty and the playing time can be adjusted ac-

cording to different parameters, such as the number

of levels, the difﬁculty of the riddles, the distribution

of the indices, the number of participants, etc. More-

over, it is important to integrate a playful aspect to

immerse the learner in the atmosphere of the SEG,

as well as to determine the pedagogical aspects and

the acquisition of competences. We will detail these

aspects in the next sections while respecting the con-

straints related to education. We reuse some elements

of the ATMSG (Activity Theory-based Model for Se-

rious Games) model (Carvalho et al., 2015) such as

the representation of serious games according to three

types of activities: "the gaming activity, the learning

activity and the instructional activity". Knowing that

for our Serious Escape Games, an riddle is composed

of multiple activities, it is important to vary their type

for more diversity.

3 CONSTRAINTS

The application of Escape Games in education brings

a certain number of additional constraints compared

to a classic Escape Game. Indeed, even if the target

audience is identiﬁed and much more homogeneous,

setting up this type of activity in a course confronts us

with the following issues:

An Escape Game is usually created for a limited

number of players (often between three and six), so to

manage a large number of students, the time slots are

multiplied. The same applies to the necessary rooms

for the implementation of this activity, which can lead

to problems of schedule.

A SEG may require a lot of material. Indeed, the

more varied the media, the better the atmosphere and

the plot (see Section 6. Background), the more cre-

ation time and / or money invested to buy the material

will be important. Moreover, if the rooms are mul-

tiplied to favor the time constraints (several sessions

played simultaneously), it will also be necessary to

multiply the material accordingly.

For the proper functioning of the activity, at least

one supervisor must master the notions of courses of

the SEG (teacher, instructional designer, etc.) by si-

multaneous session to help or guide students in difﬁ-

culty. It may be interesting to have an observer to an-

alyze problem situations and other things to improve

the device during reengineering phase.

Then, it is more or less obvious to transpose the

learning contents into riddles. Some course content

will lend itself more easily to the activity. For ex-

ample, for the opening of a three-digit padlock, an

CSEDU 2018 - 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

192

exercise whose result is a three-digit number can eas-

ily be transposed to that code. Conversely, problems

where solutions are not unique and not numerical will

require the development of mechanisms to restrict the

possibilities and matching with numbers (eg, multiple

choice questions whose answers relate to numbers.

Note that it is preferable to keep a number of com-

binations large enough to avoid ﬁnding the solution

by trial-error).

Furthermore, the implementation of a SEG re-

quires a non negligible creation time compared to the

effective time with the students. Indeed, the design as

well as the production (material, graphic design etc.)

added to the corrections made after the phases of test

are very important. It is advisable to imagine a proto-

type fast to produce for the test phases in order not to

lose time in the production of elements that would be

modiﬁed or deleted.

Thus, it is essential to take into consideration all

these constraints to schedule the installation of a Se-

rious Escape Game.

4 PEDAGOGY

The aim of this activity is primarily to provide or eval-

uate the skills and / or knowledge of the public con-

cerned. It is therefore necessary to target the crite-

ria to achieve the objectives previously set. The main

components of a SEG are riddles, so it is essential to

give them special importance. For this, several as-

pects must be taken into account:

Deﬁne the pedagogical objectives to reach: set out

the objectives of the course, which will be highlighted

in the SEG.

Deﬁne the corresponding course notions: this is

to select the concepts to be processed during the ses-

sion. Beware however to manage their number and

difﬁculty so that all the objectives are reached in the

playing time. For example, several notions can serve

the same pedagogical purpose, so it may be possible

to select only one concept per objective.

Choose the nature of the riddles: they are related

to the pedagogical objectives and may have different

purposes (learning, implementation, etc.) depending

on the type of activity. In fact, the riddles will be

constructed differently if it is a diagnostic, formative,

summative evaluation or if it is a discovery activity.

In addition, it will have a different impact on playing

time. For example, the same notion will take longer in

a discovery activity than in a summative evaluation.

Imagine concrete applications to set them up by

varying media: paper, smartphone, tablet, computer,

everyday objects, padlocks, decorations, etc. depend-

ing on the means available. Indeed, the adhesion of

the learners throughout the session will be better by

choosing and varying these elements according to the

plot. Conversely, the lack of diversity of the materials

could lead to student weariness.

Create several clues: for each riddle, it is neces-

sary to deﬁne at least one compulsory clue (which

will be hidden or not) so that the learners are able to

solve the riddles with all or some of the clues. Several

compulsory clues may be necessary for solving a rid-

dle (the riddle should not be feasible without having

found and used them). As for the optional clues, they

are a complementary help to the understanding of the

riddle (these clues are worth hiding).

Estimate the difﬁculty and deﬁne the prerequisites

of the riddles: if necessary, it might be useful to iden-

tify the dependency between the riddles (for example:

the riddle X must be solved before the riddle Y or,

conversely, there is no dependency between these rid-

dles). Moreover, it is advisable to estimate the com-

plexity of the different riddles to be able to better or-

ganize them. This can help during the parameteriza-

tion phase.

Debrieﬁng is also an important step in enabling

students to become more aware of their learning. By

unrolling and explaining all the notions seen during

the SEG, the teacher allows the students to see or re-

view the steps of the SEG. They can ask questions and

verify if their reasoning was correct during the game

session.

5 PARAMETERIZATION

The parameterization and testing phase is essential. It

is advisable to apply an Agile (as Scrum (Schwaber

and Beedle, 2002)) method which consists in itera-

tively performing these two phases. In order to ﬁt

into the constraints deﬁned in Section 3, the time, dif-

ﬁculty and linearity of the game must be adjusted. To

do this, a number of parameters must be taken into

account:

• the number of levels

• the difﬁculty of the riddles

• the number of clues and their access facility

• the number of multiple clues

• the guidance of the teacher

• the progress level of the game

• the distribution of cluess

• the link between clues and riddles

• the number of participants

• time

A Model to Design Learning Escape Games: SEGAM

193

The ﬁrst constraint is how to divide learners ac-

cording to available time slots and rooms. This will

set the number of participants (eg 3, 4 or 5) as well as

playing time. For a Serious Escape Game the recom-

mended duration time is between 1h and 2h maximum

to keep active and motivated learners.

Once the game time has been deﬁned, it will be

necessary to adjust the difﬁculty and the linearity of

the game so that learners are able to ﬁnish the SEG

in the expected time. Making the game too hard and

non linear will lead to the failure of the majority of

the learners; conversely, creating a game too easy and

too linear will lead to success of almost all learners

long before the expected time. The difﬁculty of the

parameterization is to ﬁnd the right dosage between

these two parameters. Here are some precisions to

better calibrate a SEG:

As for the number of levels, at least one is needed.

Note that associating the validation of a level with the

discovery of new elements (clues, rooms, other ob-

jects) generates a non negligible gain of interest of the

players. It is therefore advisable to put several clues

according to the overall playing time.

Then, if the riddles are varied, this will play on

the ﬂow state (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) (Chen, 2007)

of the learner. Indeed, a too difﬁcult riddle at the be-

ginning of the game can discourage the learners. A

simple idea is to organize the riddles by increasing

difﬁculty. Other alternatives are possible, for exam-

ple: alternate a simple riddle with a more complex

one to give a bit of respite to learners between two

complex riddles. In addition, this will lead to an in-

crease in motivation since they will solve the simple

riddles faster, which will encourage them to face a

more complex riddle.

Regarding the number of clues and their access fa-

cility: the more clues, the more it is possible to divide

the problems and have combinations of clues. It there-

fore increase the probability that students will try false

leads. And the more hidden are the clues, the longer

the search time. If the clues are too well hidden, they

may not be found, so it is advisable to carefully hide

the clues. For example: important clues can be hid-

den in a simple cache, however, optional clues can be

better hidden.

It is also important to focus on the number of mul-

tiple clues (used several times in the game): it is use-

ful to specify before the start of the session whether

this type of clues is present within the game or not,

this will inﬂuence the difﬁculty of the game. In their

absence, used clues can be put aside, which reduces

the possibilities and simpliﬁes the use of clues.

Next, the guidance of the teacher allows each

group to progress at roughly equivalent speeds. This

can generate frustration if learners block on a riddle.

For example, since the pedagogical interest of the ex-

cavation is low, if they take too much time to ﬁnd a

hidden clue, it is advisable to help the learners in order

not to slow down their advancement. It is therefore

unnecessary for a group of players to lose too much

time searching for clues. Secondly, a riddle posing a

problem for a group of students will require the help

of the supervisor for its resolution. Ideally, the teacher

should be able to bring each group to the end, or close

to the end of the game within the time allotted.

Another important aspect of this model is to im-

plement a way for students to position themselves in

the advancement of the activity. It is optional but al-

lows better time management by learners and gives

them a motivation to know that they are approaching

the end of the game.

In regards to the distribution of the clues paired

with the link between clues and riddles, this link is

a concrete explanation of the fact that a clue belongs

to a riddle. These two aspects play on the linearity

and the difﬁculty of the game. If the link between

the clues and the riddles is too strong and the clues

are directly usable, this makes the game too linear

and breaks the multiplayer aspect, which may induce

the boredom of some learners. On the contrary, if

there are too many clues and many riddles in parallel,

the game will be very difﬁcult and will require many

thinking and pooling by the team. This will make the

game much more time consuming. It is important to

ﬁnd a good gauge between the clues and the riddles to

make the game challenging and not to let the players

get lost, nor guiding them through a simple path.

Then, it is important to create enough content to

occupy all participants at the same time throughout

the game time. This will force the team to divide the

tasks and prevent one student from leading andrend-

ing passive the others.

Finally, the game should be achievable within a

limited time in the perspective where the participants

are all harnessed to a different task. In practice, this is

never the case, it is necessary to leave a margin for the

excavation, the pooling of the clues, the collaboration

and the common reﬂection on the riddles.

All these parameters are important for the design

phase of a SEG according to SEGAM.

6 BACKGROUND

For immersion in the game, it is advisable to pay par-

ticular attention to the background (that is to say the

context, the universe of the game). There must be

a red wire so that the learners can create links be-

CSEDU 2018 - 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

194

tween the different elements and delve into history.

We can associate this with the paradigm of narrative

centered-learning environments (Rowe et al., 2011)

which are deﬁned as "a class of game-based learning

environments that contextualize educational content

and problem solving with interactive story scenarios".

An interactive scenario of this type will have several

properties from the game that will help the students

to immerse themselves in the activity: competition,

challenge, imagination, exploration of the environ-

ment, goal to be achieved, interactions (with objects

and people), outcome, other people, the rules and the

security (no consequences on the real world) (Caballé

and Clarisó, 2016). All these elements of play are

found in a SEG and thus allow a better involvement

and motivation in the scenario. The story will thus

connect all the elements between them, and stage a

goal to be reached to motivate them. Indeed, as (Viau,

1996) says: "the perception of the value of an activity

is the student’s judgment about the importance, use-

fulness and value of a learning activity"

. To create

the atmosphere associated with the story, it is advis-

able to pay attention to: decorations, used objects, the

characters if necessary, the background music if ap-

plicable, etc. Moreover, it is possible to create a hook

beforehand by giving them for example a message to

put them in the atmosphere before they even cross the

door of the room.

The more careful these elements are, the more mo-

tivated the users will be to complete the adventure as

they will feel involved and immersed in the game.

7 EXPERIMENTATION

This model was applied as part of a combinatorial

optimization course. Combinatorial optimization is

a ﬁeld of research related to complex problems due to

the combinatorial explosion of the number of possi-

ble solutions to them. Since the enumeration of the

totality of solutions is extremely time consuming, it

is unthinkable to use conventional algorithms to solve

these problems exactly. Categories of approximation

algorithms such as metaheuristics including genetic

algorithms and local searches are then used to ﬁnd

solutions of good quality.

The objective of this SEG was to put into practice the

basic concepts of the whole course. In this experi-

ment, we have deﬁned four levels, each with an rid-

dle:

1. Application of a selection (operator used in a ge-

netic algorithm) leading to a code opening a suit-

Translated by the authors

case.

2. Application of a crossing and a mutation (opera-

tors used in a genetic algorithm) resulting in the

opening diagram of a tablet.

3. Simple application of a local search to geograph-

ical coordinates corresponding to the password of

a computer.

4. Execution of a genetic algorithm whose under-

standing of the result leads to the ﬁnal solution.

Figure 2: Adapting the model to the Escape Classroom.

With regard to the time slots, two sessions of 4

hours were necessary to pass a group of 20 students.

As for supervision, a teacher and an educational engi-

neer managed two rooms simultaneously for one-and-

a-half-hour sessions.

Figure 3: Organization of sessions.

As the tests progressed, the concept was im-

proved: in the ﬁrst version, there was no link between

the riddles and the clues and no way for the players to

situate themselves in the progress of the game. More-

over, too many clues were available at level 1. After

ﬁve test sessions, corrections were made, including

the addition of an important element: a chronological

frieze with colored symbols corresponding to some of

the clues, allowing the players to see their progress in

the game and helping them to organize themselves in

the use of the clues.

Following this, we implemented our SEG and de-

briefed with the students: after each session, but also

in full session with the whole group to re-roll the

whole game and allow all students to see (again) all

A Model to Design Learning Escape Games: SEGAM

195

Figure 4: Comparison of the knowledge assumed by the

students by chapters of the course before, after the session

and after the debrieﬁng.

the pedagogical aspects addressed in the game ses-

sion.

To evaluate the contribution of this activity (on

pedagogical and playful aspects), the students re-

ceived several forms: one before the session, for a

self-evaluation on the different chapters of the course;

another just after the session, to gather their impres-

sions and to assess whether the SEG facilitated the

acquisition of certain elements of course; and ﬁnally

a last one, just after the debrieﬁng to measure the con-

tribution of this one on the understanding of elements.

Figure 4 shows an overview of their self-assessment.

It can be noted that each step has had an impact on

their learning according to their own feelings.

To conclude, this work designed as an Escape

Game was a very interesting experience both in terms

of pedagogy and motivation. This experiment tends

to reinforce the theory of (Dale, 1954) explaining that

learning would be favored by concrete action and sim-

ulation. This SEG has been positive not only for

the students but also for the teacher. They all had

a signiﬁcant interest and motivation for this activity.

The teacher saw a better general understanding of the

course elements than in previous years. Although it is

impossible to prove that the SEG is the only reason,

Figure 5: Evolution of the averages of the last promotions.

the marks of the examination of 2016-2017 have in-

creased compared to the previous years, as shown in

Figures 5 and 6.

Figure 6: Marks on the last 4 years of the course.

Additional information on the establishment of

this Escape Game is detailed in the article Escape

Classroom : un Escape Game pour l’enseignement

(Guigon et al., 2017).

8 PERSPECTIVES

The proposed model allowed the creation of a ﬁrst

successful SEG with the students of IMT Lille Douai.

Other experiments carried out in class and followed

by further analysis will allow us to reﬁne the model.

To this end, follow-up indicators will be deﬁned and

implemented, and a set of qualitative and quantitative

traces will be collected following the experiments car-

ried out with the students and by the teachers. This

method of research is similar to the THEDRE ( Trace-

able Human Experiment Design Research) method

(Mandran, 2017) designed to accompany RICH (Hu-

man Centered Informatics Research) type of research

and applicable to TEL. In our case, the collection of

traces of use will impose the setting of appropriate

computer tools, these latters also being a way of light-

ening the work of teachers of SEG. It should be noted

that in most purely playful Escape Games players are

followed by various devices (video capturing, sound,

CSEDU 2018 - 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

196

indicators, etc.) (Wikipedia, 2017). There are many

perspectives on the use of SEG. The model should

allow us to simply carry out this type of activity for

other subjects. It can be noted that other achieve-

ments have already been proposed in various disci-

plines (Dumont and Nadam, 2016), with different au-

diences and in different contexts. Nevertheless, a cer-

tain number of brakes speciﬁc to higher education still

have to be raised up. In particular, the constraints re-

lated to the training and the numbers of students po-

tentially present in a training are important. The aim

is to deﬁne and design the tools to adapt a SEG to a

larger number of students simultaneously, and thus al-

low the monitoring of sessions on whole promotions

(more than one hundred students).

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