Escape rooms
What are they?
Escape rooms are a form of gamification in which learners are given puzzles or clues to solve, in order to open successive ‘doors’ to other rooms. Many escape rooms require a final puzzle (‘meta-puzzle’), drawing on the preceding clues, to allow learners to ‘escape’ the game, and are often time-bound, with the participants ‘locked in’ if they run out of time without successfully solving all the puzzles.
How do they work?
Escape rooms have been defined as “a live-action team-based game where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal (usually escaping from the room) in a limited amount of time” (Fotaris & Mastora, 2019, p. 2, citing Nicholson, 2015). Unlike escape rooms for entertainment, educational escape rooms have a specific cohort and learning goals in mind (Makri et al., 2021).
Escape rooms may be physical, online (digital) or hybrid, e.g. with a QR code in a physical space (Fotaris & Mastoras, 2019). Although the definitions above emphasise collaborative learning, learning technologies can facilitate online escape rooms for individual learners.
Escape rooms can be organised in an open structure – where puzzles can be solved in any order – or a sequential structure, where puzzles are presented one after the other – or a path-based structure, consisting of several paths (Makri, 2021, citing Nicholson, 2015), reminiscent of ‘choose your own adventure’ games.
Do they work?
A systematic review of escape rooms for learning, based on 68 studies between 2009-2019, revealed that escape rooms promote collaboration and teamwork, enjoyment and engagement, learning gain and increased motivation, and skills in critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, and leadership (Fotaris & Mastoras, 2019). However, challenges identified include the upfront time commitment for creating an escape room, limited resources (staff and budget), and large group sizes. Digital education escape rooms can provide a cost-effective alternative (Makri et al., 2021).
What do I need?
Workbooks are available to help scaffold the design of an escape room for education (e.g. Walsh, 2017).
References and further reading
Fotaris, P., & Mastoras, T. (2019). Escape rooms for learning: A systematic review. Proceedings of the European Conference on Games Based Learning.
Makri, A., Vlachopoulos, D., & Martina, R. A. (2021). Digital Escape Rooms as Innovative Pedagogical Tools in Education: A Systematic Literature Review. Sustainability, 13(8), 4587. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/8/4587
Walker, N. (2022). Online escape rooms. In T. Betts & P. Oprandi (Eds.), 100 ideas for active learning. University of Sussex Library. https://doi.org/10.20919/OPXR1032/77
Walsh, A. (2017). Making escape rooms for educational purposes: A workbook. Innovative Libraries.