DUDA: a digital didactic learning unit based on educational escape rooms and multisensory learning activities for primary school children during Covid-19 lockdown

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digitization, access to IT resources, and digital inclusion in the Italian school system. This paper presents D-UDA (i.e., "unità didattica di apprendimento digitale," in Italian), a digital didactic unit for learning mathematics concepts. The presented approach combines teaching methodologies based on gamification, escape rooms with a multisensory approach to designing and developing digital and multimodal technologies. D-UDA is divided into two parts: the first part of puzzles, adherent to the Invalsi (Istituto Nazionale per la Valutazione del Sistema educativo di Istruzione e di formazione) guidelines for mathematics learning, and the second part related to the development of transversal competencies through multisensory games. Finally, D-UDA invites children to create their adventure by using the same tools employed by the designers to develop the experience. The children who tested the D-UDA in June 2020 were asked to fill in usability questionnaires. Preliminary results show the goodness of an educational intervention integrating recent pedagogical theories and teaching methodologies with a multisensory perspective and a technological design.