Strengthening Higher Education for Sustainable Development: Gamification and SDG 16

Sustainable Development Goal 16 aims to create effective, accountable, and inclusive public institutions at all levels. To achieve this, these institutions must develop a proper level of transparency and efficiently analyze their accounts. Hence, there is a need to improve students’ learning in the economic analysis of Public Administrations, as they will be responsible for preparing and analyzing public accounts in the future. Previous studies have shown how gamification can strengthen the knowledge and skills that students need to acquire (Ortiz-Martínez et al. in Int J Manag Educ 20(1):100584, 2022; Ortiz-Martínez et al. in Educ Inf Technol 28(12):671–686, 2023). Therefore, in this project, we created a virtual escape room to provide students with a more practical and interactive experience. This allows them to explore in-depth the contents of Economic-Financial Information Analysis of Public Administration of the Degree in Political Science, Government, and Public Administration at the University of Murcia during the academic years 2021/22 and 2022/23. The results demonstrate how students who participated in the escape room experienced an increase in their motivation towards the subject, which resulted in superior learning compared to the other classmates who did not decide to participate in this test. Thus, the attendance percentage at the exam was higher among the students who participated in the escape room than those who did not. The same has been found regarding the results of the final exam. Students who participated in the escape room obtained better grades than the rest of the students, thus demonstrating the positive effects of this gamification on students’ motivation and learning. This research can encourage other teachers to carry out tests through gamification that increase students’ motivation towards their subject and thereby achieve improvement in learning and results.