This paper presents an educational development project where game-based learning is used to facilitate introductory programming courses in higher education. The identified problem that is addressed in the project is the low pass rate and low student satisfaction in university courses on fundamental programming. A recommended pre-training for programming is computational thinking, and to learn about the fundamental concepts that are involved in programming, independent of specific programming languages. An initial literary review revealed that there exist several educational games on the combination of computational thinking and programming, However, these games are targeted towards a younger target group, or that they have a focus on specific programming. The aim of this study is to explicate the described problem, and to gather requirements for the design and development of an educational escape room. The research project follows the design science approach where the first two steps 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 education that teach fundamental programming courses. Answers were collected from teachers from three different universities in Sweden and analysed with open coding. Findings identified through the analysis will be used in future research studies to address the remaining steps of the design science methodology and further iterations of development. Findings show that some fundamental concepts seem to be relatively easy 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. Some concepts that are seen as harder to introduce and explain are nested iteration and ternary operators. The conclusion is to build a game with different levels of thematic escape rooms, where the first levels have a focus on what teachers mentioned as easy concepts. The highest levels should introduce the more complex concepts, but that the concepts that are seen as most problematic could be omitted. This study was the first iteration in the definition of requirements, and more interviews will be conducted and analysed in the next phase of this two-year project.