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Do you remember the Indiana Jones science fiction movie when his mission was to break into the catacombs, find the alchemical stone inside, and make it out alive? The character combined all his experience, archaeological knowledge, and mental acuity to resolve challenges that confronted him. His purpose was to find treasures or valuable objects and get out with them alive, facing dangers and threats. On his way, he had to fight his fears, work on a team, trust his teammates’ abilities, and hopefully achieve his goal. In the educational field, we can generate a similar experience to reinforce or improve students’ learning processes through physical escape rooms or virtual ones on digital platforms.
Escape rooms are live-action games that involve solving puzzles to find the way out in a specified time. The company SCRAP made the first known escape room in Japan in 2007. This “Real Escape Game” wasdesigned for a team of five to six players. Since then, its implementation has spread to other parts of the world (Nicholson, 2015). In the game’s dynamics, participants discover riddles and clues, solve puzzles, or perform some activity to achieve a specific goal to leave the room within a time limit (Veldkamp et al., 2020) and have fun in the process. Entertainment is the main objective of these games. However, in the educational field, it evolved and was adapted to be used for learning purposes in different areas of knowledge.
“Experience has shown that escape rooms with an intermediate level of difficulty and with technological development are the most appreciated by students.”
Escape room as a playful learning tool for education
In the educational scenario, the design of the escape room game is oriented toward achieving specific learning objectives in a collaborative environment. The riddles, clues, enigmas, and activities must be related to a learning objective. In the literature, we can find different uses for escape rooms in education. Below, we describe some briefly.
In the chemical engineering laboratory at the University of Toulouse, through the design of an escape room, students practice and associate basic chemistry concepts such as the periodic table, the balancing of chemical equations, and the calculation of moles through riddles and enigmas that increase motivation and teamwork during class. (Dietrich, 2018).
At the University of Kentucky School of Medicine, students must learn the fundamentals of infectious diseases. They need to memorize large volumes of information about pathogens, antibiotics, patients, and the interactions among the three. The escape room is designed to foster critical thinking and debate skills that help them find possible solutions to different diagnoses as a team. (Jeffres y Biehle, 2018).
The University of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovakia, conducted a study in which it developed an escape room to review programming concepts and computer networks at the high school level. They designed different puzzles for an educational topic of programming and computer networks to be resolved as a specific task during the game (Huraj, Hrmo y Sejutová Hudáková, 2022).
Application of Digital Educational Escape Rooms in hybrid and online courses
The acceleration of incorporating technology as a tool to reinforce or improve the learning process of students makes the use of Digital Educational Escape Rooms (DEERs) (Gordillo et al., 2020) more relevant in both hybrid and online courses because digital technological tools support them.
There are several tools to create DEERs, such as Mozilla Hub, Zoom, and Genially. The latter is a user-friendly platform for creating escape rooms; its usability is straightforward and quickly developed with a free account.
At Tecnologico de Monterrey, we designed two escape rooms collaboratively and multi-disciplinarily within the 2019 and 2021 Training Units in the Department of Digital Education in Educational Innovation. Teachers, instructional designers, programmers, graphic designers, and project managers participated. The design and development of the escape roomstook approximately three months.
Below, we share the details of these projects:
Conscious Capitalism: This DEER was designed as a tool to review key concepts before the midterm exam of the Conscious Leadership in a Business course for higher education students. It was developed in Zoom for a hybrid course taught on several campuses. It had two spaces with different puzzles designed. Each time the students managed to solve all the riddles of the first room, they were given a key allowing them to pass to the next room. After solving the riddles in the second room, they arrived at a final room with general information on the most relevant concepts of the topics of the midterm exam. The duration of the escape room can take from 50 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the difficulty level.
Identity manual. A need to establish communication between teams arises when designing an identity manual for a client in the Strategic Communication, Image, and Public Relations course. It is developed with Mozilla Hub. It consists of three rooms: the first is to become familiar with the basic concepts as they accommodate the images representing each concept; the second is to create a board with images. Once completed, they can escape from the room. Finally, there are two social media interfaces where the students create a public image for their clients. The time allowed for the student to complete the tour is two hours maximum.
DEERs have helped us to make the teaching-learning process more playful and have become a tool for digital education. Some types can be:
Review of activities: Concepts can be placed within a virtual or digital world so that students can link the concepts with images. It allows the student to navigate freely, exploring the various possible answers to get out or escape with the correct answers.
Construction activities. The student can communicate and dialogue in these resources to reach precise conclusions in the joint agreement. The only way to escape is to come up with the proper evidence.
There are different stages for DEER development. The steps we followed were:
- Type of escape room. Define the type of escape room required according to the learning objectives.
- General structure. Develop a structure from the definition of spaces and topics to be covered.
- Contextualization. Describe each part of the escape room, considering the characteristics of each room. It is essential to include the theme and storytelling.
- Design of spaces. Design the particular elements of each part, For example, objects, images, clues, and riddles. The clues must be laid out to help students correctly solve puzzles.
- Type of team. Determine if the DEER requires a multidisciplinary team or can be handled individually.
- Final review. Once the design is finished, perform tests to correct errors or confirm the difficulty level of the DEER.
The objective of showing the activities or concepts in DEERs is that students learn playfully but, above all, experience active learning where they are the protagonists and make decisions about the possible answers. It could not happen in a traditional activity or exam.
Reflection
Incorporating escape rooms for learning is challenging due to the time required for their development and the technological skills of teachers and the academic team to achieve it. However, students tell us that escape rooms have been a tool to reinforce their knowledge of the subjects. The fusion between fun and academics has made students feel motivated to participate in these activities.
It is vital that before carrying out this type of activity, there is a previous activity to raise awareness about the use of the resource by both teaching staff and students. Experience has shown that escape rooms at an intermediate level of difficulty and technological development are the most appreciated by students.
Generation Z is digital natives who have grown up with technology, so it is imperative to adopt technological advances in teaching practices. In this way, we can attract these students’ attention and generate more motivation for them to learn the course contents and improve their performance and educational experience.
About the authors
Nelly Ramírez-Vásquez (nelly.ramirez@tec.mx) is a business professor at the professional level at Tecnologico de Monterrey with more than five years of experience in online, hybrid, and face-to-face courses. She is an international speaker.
Rosario Rosas-Escalona (rosas.escalona@tec.mx) has been an instructional designer for 11 years in the Department of Educational Innovation at Tecnologico de Monterrey.
References
Gordillo, A., López-Fernández, D., López-Pernas, S., & Quemada, J. (2020). Evaluating an educational escape room conducted remotely for teaching software engineering. IEEE Access, 8, 225032-225051. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3044380
Dietrich, N. (2018). Escape classroom: The Leblanc process – An educational “escape game.” Journal of Chemical Education, 95(6), 996-999. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00690
Huraj, L., Hrmo, R., & Sejutová Hudáková, M. (2022). The Impact of a Digital Escape Room Focused on HTML and Computer Networks on Vocational High School Students. Educ. Sci. 2022, 12, 682. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12100682
Jeffres, M., & Biehle, L. R. (2018). 1313. Does Time Fly When Having Fun? A Study Assessing the Relationship Between Estimated Time on Task and Enjoyment of Infectious Diseases Serious Games. Open Forum Infectious Diseases, 5(Suppl 1), S401–S402. https://doi.org/10.1093/ofid/ofy210.1146
Nicholson, S. (2015). Peeking Behind the Locked Door: A Survey of Escape Room Facilities. [Online]. Available: http://scottnicholson.com/pubs/erfacwhite.pdf
Veldkamp, A., van de Grint, L., Knippels, M. C. P. J., & van Joolingen, W. R. (2020). Escape education: A systematic review on escape rooms in education. In Educational Research Review 31(January), 100364. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100364
Edition by Rubí Román (rubi.roman@tec.mx) – Edu bits and Webinars Editor – “Learning that inspires” – Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education of Tec de Monterrey.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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