Twenty-first century education demands teacher innovation in classroom management. The teaching approach shifts from being centered on the teacher as the transmitter of knowledge to focusing on the student as the protagonist of the learning process. The application of active methodologies to create interesting didactic experiences which seem to increase students’ motivation has gained ground in the last few years. The entry into the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) brought change to Higher Education. The competences deriving from the EHEA are of a practical nature and therefore must be worked on by means of active methods. Furthermore, University legislation establishes that their fundamental challenge is to transform the processes of learning and teaching to continuously adapt to the demands posed by society. For this purpose, innovative active methodologies are specified for the development of the structure of the curriculum, including the inverted classroom, learning based on project work or case studies, or gamification, among others. Gamification consists of playing games in non-traditional or face-to-face environments and helps to stimulate motivation, interest, attention, pleasure in learning and fun, among other aspects. An example of a gamification activity is the escape room, which consists of creating a situation that requires the collaboration of a group of people to solve a series of challenges aimed at ‘escaping from a room’. The main objective in this research was to analyze the implementation of an escape room as a didactic tool for learning teaching styles in the subject Physical Education Didactics from the Primary Education Degree. This research followed a quantitative methodology of a descriptive type with a post-test after the intervention. A total of 44 university students participated, of whom 54.5% were men and 45.5% women, with an average age of 20.11± 1.52 years. The students experienced a teaching unit about the spectrum of teaching styles, involving 4 theoretical lessons and 4 practical lessons with different episodes. After this unit students had an escape room session in which they had to solve four challenges related to the unit. The questionnaire was administered after the lesson to evaluate the students' perceptions of the escape room technique. This questionnaire had 12 items, 3 dimensions, motivation, learning and evaluation and a Cronbach's alpha of .957 Among the most relevant results, it is worth highlighting that the students considered this didactic tool to be useful for improving learning (4.59±0.60), followed by evaluation (4.47±0.53) and lastly as a tool for increasing motivation (3.84±0.77). There are statistically significant differences (p≤0.05) in the evaluation variable according to gender, with men scoring this variable higher than women.

Keywords: Innovation, pedagogical method, higher education.