This paper presents an educational development project where game-based learning is used to facilitateintroductory programming courses in higher education. The identified problem that is addressed in theproject is the low pass rate and low student satisfaction in university courses on fundamentalprogramming. A recommended pre-training for programming is computational thinking, and to learnabout the fundamental concepts that are involved in programming, independent of specific programminglanguages. An initial literary review revealed that there exist several educational games on thecombination of computational thinking and programming, However, these games are targeted towards ayounger target group, or that they have a focus on specific programming. The aim of this study is toexplicate the described problem, and to gather requirements for the design and development of aneducational escape room. The research project follows the design science approach where the first twosteps of 1) explicate the problem and 2) define the requirements were studied and described in this paper.The problem to address in the study was identified through literature searches and the authors’experiences as teachers in programming at higher education. To address the identified problem,requirements for a digital game were defined through e-mail interviews with teachers in higher educationthat teach fundamental programming courses. Answers were collected from teachers from three differentuniversities in Sweden and analysed with open coding. Findings identified through the analysis will beused in future research studies to address the remaining steps of the design science methodology andfurther iterations of development. Findings show that some fundamental concepts seem to be relativelyeasy to introduce while others are harder to grasp for students taking their first programming course.Examples of concepts that could be learnt relatively easy are variables and non-nested selection. Someconcepts that are seen as harder to introduce and explain are nested iteration and ternary operators. Theconclusion is to build a game with different levels of thematic escape rooms, where the first levels have afocus on what teachers mentioned as easy concepts. The highest levels should introduce the morecomplex concepts, but that the concepts that are seen as most problematic could be omitted. This studywas the first iteration in the definition of requirements, and more interviews will be conducted andanalysed in the next phase of this two-year project.