Gami-Math: Educational Escape Rooms as Learning Environments, an Optimal Tool for Horizontal Mathematization and Curricular Integration

This paper, by researchers at the University of Cadiz, argues that Spanish students' weak mathematics performance on PISA and the below-average didactic-mathematical knowledge of Spanish teachers in the TEDS-M study call for targeted teacher training grounded in game-based learning. The authors identify three challenges: the "curricular isolation" of mathematics, which leaves it disconnected from other subjects and everyday reality; the need for specialized mathematics education for trainee teachers; and the math anxiety experienced by both students and teachers. They propose addressing these through educational escape rooms that students design to mobilize mathematical competencies in a curricular integration approach, which the authors hypothesize can benefit both primary-school pupils and the trainee teachers who design them.

The proposed intervention is a two-year student-teacher mentoring program in which trainee teachers, working with cooperating primary schools (CEIPs), design, implement, evaluate, and redesign escape rooms addressing difficulties reported by in-service teachers. The program began with a group of five students and has grown in subsequent years. It is framed around three research questions: whether escape rooms can promote curricular integration, how to analyze didactic situations, and how to assess the approach's effects on knowledge, skills, and math anxiety.

The paper's stated contribution is a summary and report of outcomes over four years of the program, organized around connectivity and recontextualization of mathematical knowledge, improvement of didactic-mathematical knowledge and related professional skills, and reduction of math anxiety. The text provided, however, does not present quantitative results, sample data, or evaluation outcomes for these measures; its evidence base is largely the cited national and international reports and prior work by the same authors. Readers should therefore treat the program's claimed benefits as reported intentions rather than demonstrated findings within this document.