Cecilia TENG
Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health (SSHSPH)
Cecilia discusses applying virtual escape rooms to enhance student engagement in her statistics course, and reflects on what worked well and what requires improvement from implementing this game-based approach over five iterations.
Teng, C. (2025, April 24). How I made learning statistics fun in the classroom. CTLT Teaching Connections. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/teachingconnections/2025/04/24/2025-tengcwc/
In an undergraduate public health course where I teach introductory statistics, I faced the following learning-related challenges: (i) students come from a wide range of non-statistics disciplines, each with varying levels of statistical experience; (ii) statistics is often perceived to be a challenging subject and generally associated with other negative student attitudes, and (iii) the course sees a large class size of 50 to 90 students. In short, student engagement was a key issue.
As a fan of escape rooms, I saw the potential of using game-based learning to address these challenges. In the simplest form of an escape room, players are “locked” in a room where, within a given time limit, they need to work as a team to solve puzzles and use other hidden clues to “escape” from the room. Given the logistical, space, and time constraints that hinder practical implementation of a physical escape room in a large class setting, I felt that a virtual format of the game would be more operationally feasible.
Conceptualising and developing the escape room was an intellectual pursuit in itself (colleagues who are interested in creating similar educational games may refer to my explainer in the Times Higher Education for practical tips on this topic). The game was implemented as part of a flipped session during the first week of the quantitative methods section of the course. The game puzzles were aligned with the lesson’s learning objectives. Students were instructed to watch the video lectures before class. I felt that conducting the game early in the semester might also help “break the ice” and ease students into group work in the subsequent weeks, so students were instructed to play the team-based game in their project groups (Figure 1). A post-game debrief was held at the end of the session.
Figure 1. Students at the beginning of the virtual escape room.
I reflect on my experience in the following sections, having developed and successfully implemented the virtual escape room in my class over five iterations thus far:
What Worked Well?
The escape room was an immersive and highly engaging learning experience for students. The activity was perceived by most to be more engaging and effective than a typical didactic tutorial. Students frequently remarked that the game helped them to reinforce and apply concepts from the video lectures: “The game is super super[sic] fun! It is a very enjoyable tutorial and it helped to recap a lot of the lecture content covered and apply it.” Pre- and post-tests suggest significant learning gains were achieved.
The game effectively fostered active learning, peer learning, and camaraderie among students. Students were observed to collaborate with their group members (alongside guidance from the tutor if required) to tackle the in-game tasks. As one student commented: “Different teammates have a stronger suit in different sections and we help each other and have fun together.”
There was also evidence suggesting that some students confronted their own assumptions during the gameplay: “Learning statistics can be…fun”; “… [I had assumed] that I knew some of the statistical knowledge…”
What Could be Better for Future Runs of the Game?
In-game hints were configured within the virtual game for this learning activity. However, the post-game feedback indicated that some of the instructions or in-game hints were not sufficiently straightforward. While the game masters (my colleague and I) offered to provide additional hints on-demand during the session, very few groups proactively reached out to us, which likely led to some groups getting stuck on a puzzle for a long time. To address these issues, we reviewed and refined the instructions and/or in-game hints. Moving forward, we intend to actively monitor each group’s progress and offer guidance to the groups that we observe to be struggling significantly. In addition, considerations are being made to ensure that the game mechanics do not add too much extraneous cognitive load on students. Lastly, a few students suggested using a cooperative game design1. While this design may further enhance collaboration and peer learning, we are mindful that more advanced game programming would be required. It is a potential enhancement to consider for future iterations of this game within the course.
Endnote
- An example of a cooperative game design is where the puzzles and/or clues are “broken up” into smaller pieces and each team member receives a different piece. Students will have to share their own clue-piece or puzzle-piece with their teammates and collaborate to solve in-game tasks. This is as opposed to the existing design, where each team member gets the same clues and full puzzles.
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Cecilia TENG is a senior lecturer from the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health (SSHSPH). She currently teaches undergraduate public health courses and is passionate about exploring creative ways to increase student engagement. Cecilia can be reached at ephtwcc@nus.edu.sg. |
