University classroom gamification: a "reverse escape room" experience

The resource of teaching through games (gamification) has also been extended to teaching at the University, with good results. In this work we present an enriching experience of gamification in the classroom, carried out in the subjects Statistics II, of the Degree in Finance and Accounting, of the Universitat de Valencia and Mathematics 1, of the Bachelor's Degree in the Fundamentals of Architecture of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia. We call it "flipped escape room", in reference to the fact that our playful activity consisted, unlike the popularly known leisure activity, in managing to return to a closed space, the "temple of knowledge", the classroom, not in getting out of it. Students carried out the activity in small groups and used typical material from the "escape rooms". They had all the facilities of the centre at their disposal and, for approximately two hours, they covered an itinerary through the various dependencies solving interesting riddles (mathematical and statistical) and chained problems. In this work we describe the activity in detail and carry out a first study of its impact on the teaching-learning process. In this sense, if one takes into account that the main objective of all educational innovation is to facilitate learning and improve student performance, the activity was a success. The opinions of the participating students were very positive: they considered the activity enjoyable, useful, interesting and fun, at the same time that it contributed to increasing their interest in the subject.