Cocriação de um Escape Room Educativo Imersivo para o ensino de História

Abstract

This research aimed to analyze the development of the co-creation design of an Immersive Educational Escape Room (IEER) for teaching History in the 3rd cycle of Basic Education in Portugal, focusing on the theme of the Portuguese Discoveries, a subject taught in the 8th grade. A lack of focus, rote memorization, and student demotivation for learning History were the main factors that motivated this study of the co-creation of the design of an IEER, supported by an IEER design framework. Thus was developed a prototype of a pedagogical tool to improve students' engagement and develop their critical thinking. The research methodology combined Design-Based Research (DBR) with some Participatory Research techniques. The co-creation design process involved the participation of future teachers (second-year students of the Master's program in Teaching History in the 3rd cycle of Basic Education and in Secondary Education, from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of University of Porto - FLUP) in a co-creation workshop to align the narrative of the IEER and a set of mini-games with the curriculum. A digital prototype was developed in Unity, where this narrative was divided into six historical Points of Interest. This final prototype was, in turn, tested with the same group of future teachers, demonstrating that 78.6% consider the activity viable in a classroom context. These results support the hypothesis that IEERs increase motivation, interest, and discussion of problems in the History subject, although there are still practical limitations, such as class duration, regarding their implementation.