No Escape! The rise of escape rooms in secondary science education

Abstract

The phenomenon of escape rooms in education is unique as it emerged spontaneously in all levels of education around the world. This development was not driven by national curricula, educational research institutes or schoolboards. Science teachers make up a large portion of the pioneers adapting the escape room concept to the classroom. This study explores the rise of educational escape rooms, with the guiding questions: What is its educational potential for secondary science education? What are adequate principles and guidelines for designing and implementing escape rooms in secondary science education? The first study using a phenomenological approach, showed that escape rooms can provide authentic environments with meaningful activities requiring the use of content knowledge and skills, while working in teams under time restrictions. The diverse content-based activities stimulate diverse forms of talents with room for experiment and failure. Escape rooms create feelings of mastery, ownership, and mutual dependence, resulting in high student engagement (regardless of age or gender). The study also resulted in an overview of boundary conditions for escape rooms in education. In a systematic review, common practices and theoretical considerations regarding specific educational and game design aspects were synthesized. Thereafter, the relations between educational and game design aspects were studied. It also showed that the teachers’ role during the gameplay is diverse and delicate; too much or lack of guidance appears to disrupt the students’ feeling of immersion and autonomy. In the third study, we investigated how the escape room concept can adequately be adapted to education, using a design-based approach and the outcomes of the previous studies. In three design cycles in co-participation with students, it resulted in escape boxes. The boxes are hexagonal and have changeable fronts. The fronts offer various tools, such as a laptop screen, a magnet board, buttons linked to an embedded microchip, and hatches with locks. Puzzles placed on each side of the fronts put players face to face with each other and stimulate them to collaborate. The storyboard option was used to structure the game, support the narrative with movie clips and revealed hints for teams lagging behind. The fourth study, showed that the escape boxes successfully fostered collaboration and scaffolded collaborative learning processes. However, collaborative learning hardly occurred during gameplay. Time appears to be an ambiguous factor in science learning during the escape room gameplay. It gives urgence to players’ thinking, acting, and creates mutual dependency. At the same time, it limits discussion and time to reflect on the content. To unlock the escape rooms’ full potential as a learning activity, the game requires an adequate design with debriefing afterwards. In addition, the outcomes provide: (1) an overview of the main differences between common recreational and educational settings with boundary conditions; (2) design guidelines for an educational escape room; (3) a framework on designing escape rooms which takes into account the major challenges for education. The framework and guidelines will help educators to create escape rooms that foster science learning and support students’ feelings of autonomy, discovery, and victory.