Digital Escape Games in Educational Programs for Financial Literacy

"Escape from the Castle" is a digital escape game developed by researchers at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, the GAME Science Research Center, and Intesa Sanpaolo's Neuroscience Lab, in collaboration with the Museum of Saving in Turin, Italy. Its goal is to build financial self-efficacy in early adolescents by conveying that money is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Players solve four puzzles across four castle rooms, each tied to a financial theme such as budgeting, saving strategies, and savings planning. The central question is whether cooperative play improves learning compared with individual play.

The main experiment involved 118 students aged 11 to 14 from six Turin middle-school classes, randomly assigned to a cooperative (treatment) or individual (control) condition during a museum visit. Cooperative groups obtained roughly double the score of individual players (about 43 versus 25 points, p < .001), and the advantage held in the lobby, kitchen, and library puzzles, though not the lounge area. Completion times were about one minute shorter for cooperative groups, but this difference was not statistically significant. Only 40 percent of cooperative players finished within the time limit, compared with 15 percent of individual players. Eye-tracking data on pupil dilation were gathered from a small subset of students and preliminarily suggested higher engagement among collaborating players, though the authors note these data were difficult to standardize in the museum setting.

A four-week voluntary online retention phase tested gamification. Of 20 students who returned, 18 came from a school offering weekly leaderboard updates and symbolic prizes, generating 154 sessions versus 3 from the school without incentives. Scores rose by about 20 points between a student's first and second sessions (p = .007), which the authors interpret as evidence of learning by doing. The study's sample is modest, the retention-phase group is very small and self-selected, and the authors acknowledge that COVID-19 constrained data collection and motivated planned follow-up work using EEG in laboratory settings.