An Interactive Online Application for Active Learning Using Escape Rooms

Sjalvst¨ andigt¨ arbete i informationsteknologi 13 juni 2021 An Interactive Online Application for Active Learning using Escape Rooms Andreas Bleichner Christoffer Nyberg Nils Hermansson Sebastian Fallman¨ Civilingenjorsprogrammet¨ i informationsteknologi Master Programme in Computer and Information Engineering Abstract Institutionen for¨ An Interactive Online Application for Active informationsteknologi Learning using Escape Rooms Besoksadress:¨ ITC, Polacksbacken Lagerhyddsv¨ agen¨ 2 Andreas Bleichner Christoffer Nyberg Postadress: Box 337 Nils Hermansson 751 05 Uppsala Sebastian Fallman¨ Hemsida: https://www.it.uu.se As the pandemic of 2020 broke out there was an increase in the use of virtual meeting rooms as a platform for holding online lectures. The use- fulness of being able to attend a lecture comfortably from home cannot be denied, however participants report feeling less engaged in lectures when studying remotely. By involving and engaging the participants in online lectures with the help of virtual Escape Rooms the participants can feel more engaged and perform better in their schoolwork. The result is a prototype that showcases how virtual Escape Rooms can be used for educational purposes. The prototype consists of a room that connects to a group of Escape Rooms. The participants can interact with each other and objects as well as communicate through text and voice chat. Further work is necessary for the application to be an effective tool for education. Extern handledare: Matthew Davis Handledare: Mats Daniels, Anne Peters, Bjorn¨ Victor och Tina Vrieler Examinator: Bjorn¨ Victor Sammanfattning Nar¨ pandemin brot¨ ut 2020 okade¨ anvandningen¨ av virtuella motesrum¨ som en platt- form for¨ onlineforel¨ asningar.¨ Anvandbarheten¨ av att bekvamt¨ fran˚ hemmet kunna delta i forel¨ asningar¨ kan inte fornekas,¨ men undersokningar¨ visar pa˚ att deltagare i virtuella motesrum¨ kanner¨ sig mindre engagerade i forel¨ asningar¨ nar¨ de deltar pa˚ distans. Ge- nom att involvera och engagera deltagarna i onlineforel¨ asningar¨ med hjalp¨ av virtuella Escape Rooms kan deltagarna kanna¨ sig mer engagerade och prestera battre¨ i sitt skol- arbete. Resultatet ar¨ en prototyp som visar hur virtuella Escape Rooms kan anvandas¨ i utbildningssyfte. Prototypen bestar˚ av ett rum som ar¨ sammankopplat till en grupp Escape Rooms. Deltagarna kan interagera med varandra, samt interagera med objekt och kommunicera via textchatt och rostkommunikation.¨ Ytterligare arbete behovs¨ for¨ att applikationen ska vara ett effektivt verktyg for¨ utbildning. ii Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Background 3 2.1 Virtual Meeting Room . .3 2.2 Escape Room . .4 2.3 Active Learning in Escape Rooms . .4 2.4 External Stakeholder . .5 3 Purpose, Aims and Motivation 5 3.1 Purpose . .6 3.2 Aims . .6 3.3 Motivation . .6 4 Sustainability and Ethics 7 4.1 Sustainability . .7 4.2 Ethics . .7 4.2.1 Availability . .7 5 Related Work 8 5.1 Unlock the Future - An Educational Escape Game . .8 5.2 Similar Products . .8 5.2.1 Engage . .8 5.2.2 Breakout EDU . .9 6 Method 10 6.1 Game Engine - Unity . 10 iii 6.2 Networking - Mirror . 10 6.3 Communication - Vivox . 11 7 System Structure 11 7.1 Clients . 11 7.2 Server . 12 7.3 Voice Communication . 12 8 Application Usage 12 9 Implementation 16 9.1 Managing the Escape Rooms . 16 9.2 State Synchronization . 17 9.3 Handling Commands . 17 10 Requirements and Evaluation Methods 18 10.1 Usability Requirements . 18 10.2 Evaluating Usability . 19 10.3 Requirements and Evaluation of Communication Functionality . 20 11 Evaluation Results 21 11.1 Initial Usability Test Results . 21 11.2 Evaluation of Communication Functionality . 22 11.3 The Second Usability Test Results . 22 12 Results and Discussion 23 13 Conclusion 24 iv 14 Future Work 25 Appendix 29 A First User Survey Results for Initial Prototype 29 B Second User Survey Results 33 v 1 Introduction 1 Introduction The development of the internet over the last few decades has provided us with many new and exciting tools that we can use to improve our everyday life. One such tool is the virtual meeting room. The usage of Zoom for example, an online virtual meeting room [38], skyrocketed in 2020 going from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 [36] to 300 million daily participants in April 2020 [37] due to the pandemic that occurred and prevented people from physically meeting in large groups. Virtual meeting rooms offer both advantages and disadvantages compared to physical meetings. They can offer an easy way of sharing links to websites and documents with participants during a meeting and increase the availability to work from home. Students and other users have reported that they experienced complications after transitioning to these meeting rooms [18]. The usage of the meeting rooms might cause tiredness [14] and a reduced sense of engagement [1], resulting in students not learning as much from lectures in virtual meeting rooms as they could have [9, pages 10-12]. Our proposed solution to this issue is a virtual meeting room in 3D (Figure 1) that has tools which can increase the engagement of the students, from now on referred to as participants, in the meeting room. By having the participants discuss and cooperate with each other we want to achieve more interactions among the participants compared to other virtual meeting rooms. The user, meaning the host or a participant, starts in a meeting room referred to as the ”main room”. Each user controls a virtual avatar. The participants can go through a doorway in the main room to move to a room called an Escape Room. In the Escape Room the participants have to complete tasks in order to be able to exit the room. There can be many different types of tasks such as finding the correct password to a keypad or pushing buttons in a specific order. It was intended for Escape Rooms to be customized by the host to fit the material being discussed or taught however this feature was eventually scrapped due to time constraints. Multiple Escape Rooms have been created and linked together in succession so that when the students complete one Escape Room, they walk through a door in the completed room to get to the next Escape Room. The participants can move to the next room when they complete the given tasks. There is a timer in each room counting down from a set time limit to induce a sense of urgency upon the participants. 1 1 Introduction Figure 1 Two players standing in the main room. In order to move around and interact with objects within the 3D room, the participant can look around by moving the mouse and use a set of commands from the keyboard and mouse to move and interact with objects. The set of commands are shown in Table 1. The resulting application was evaluated by doing usability tests. These tests showed us that the application was generally easy and enjoyable to use. Some usability issues where found as some test participants reported that they did not immediately understand the controls and sometimes had minor issues understanding each other using voice communication. However, despite this all test participants were successfully able to learn the controls, interact with the tasks in the Escape Rooms and communicate with each other using both voice and text chat. Command Key Command Key Move forward W Jump Space Move left A Open Menu Esc Move backwards S Interact Left Mouse Button Move right D Table 1 Set of commands to be used as a user Declaration of Division of Labor All group members have been involved in both the development of the application, research as well as writing the report. We felt like having all group members involved in all aspects of the project was a good idea in order for each group member to gain insight into all parts of the system. In each area of the project there were tasks that we distributed as evenly as possible. 2 2 Background Nils focused on integration of voice communication as well as designing the audio menu. Sebastian designed and developed the keypad component (including network synchronization) in the escape rooms, implemented the text chat and assisted in syn- chronizing physics objects across the network. Andreas aided Nils with the integration of voice communication, designed the picture board component in the escape rooms and conducted the user tests. Christoffer designed the main menu, implemented the player controls and handled network synchronization of players, physics objects, and components within the Escape Rooms. All group members have been involved with reviewing and incorporating feedback into each section of the report. While each member has contributed to all sections in some capacity, there are sections which each member focused on. Nils focused on writing about the Purpose, Aims and Motivations of the project, Sus- tainability and Ethics as well as Results and Discussion. Sebastian focused on parts of the Background, Purpose, Aims and Motivation, Related Work, parts of Requirements and Evaluation, Evaluation Results and Results and Discussion. Andreas focused on the Introduction, parts of the Background, parts of Sustainability and Ethics, parts of Requirements and Evaluation Methods, Evaluation Results and the Results and Discus- sion. Christoffer wrote primarily about Method, System Structure, parts of Application Usage, Implementation, Requirements and Evaluation Methods and Future Work. 2 Background This project focuses on creating a platform that uses a virtual meeting room combined with Escape Rooms to engage students in active learning in a 3D environment. Virtual meeting rooms, Escape Rooms and active learning are aspects that are central in our project and therefore presented in this section. We will also talk about our external stakeholder. 2.1 Virtual Meeting Room A virtual meeting room is a digital environment that allows participants to meet and connect to each other in real-time online.

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