Building Digital Educational Escape Rooms: A Modular Toolkit with Low-Code Authoring Approach

Abstract

Digital Educational Escape Rooms (DEERs) represent a compelling form of game-based learning that situates collaborative problem-solving at its core. Grounded in constructivist and collaborative learning principles, DEERs require teams to negotiate meaning, coordinate actions, and apply prior knowledge under time pressure, conditions that promote deeper cognitive engagement and knowledge consolidation. The game environment provides intrinsic motivation through narrative immersion and immediate feedback, while cooperative mechanics cultivate communication and shared responsibility. Systematic reviews confirm that DEERs foster teamwork, communication, and critical thinking, yet adoption remains limited because creating pedagogically sound DEERs demands both instructional design expertise and substantial technical skill. Existing authoring tools either sacrifice expressiveness for usability or require programming knowledge, leaving a significant gap for non-technical educators seeking to design rich, interactive learning experiences aligned with curricular goals. This work in progress paper presents the DEER-Wizard, a low-code authoring approach that guides educators through a multi-step configuration covering puzzle structure, narrative flow, and learning objectives. Each step is grounded in established DEER design principles, including narrative framing, interdependent puzzles, adaptive hint strategies, and structured debriefing, ensuring that pedagogical alignment is built into the authoring process rather than treated as an afterthought. A connected DEER-Generator converts the completed configuration into a playable game. The Wizard builds on the DEER-Toolkit embedded in a 2D multiplayer dungeon crawler with cooperative play and xAPI-based learning analytics that support formative assessment. Together, Wizard and Toolkit enable non-technical educators to design pedagogically aligned DEERs without programming expertise, directly addressing the power-usability dilemma identified in authoring tool research. The DEER-Wizard is a conceptual design with a prototype implementation in progress. A planned mixed-methods evaluation will examine usability for educators and learning outcomes for students in authentic higher education settings. The Wizard, the Toolkit, and the generated Escape Room Games are and will continue to be released as open-source software and open educational resources.