Escape rooms: discovering clues, solving puzzles and working as a team
Escape rooms: discovering clues, solving puzzles and working as a team
Jamie Heywood
What is the idea?
An escape room is a game where players, working in a team, solve puzzles and complete short tasks. This is typically within a set time limit, with the overall aim to achieve a specific end goal – usually to ‘escape’!
Escape rooms can be set up in a physical environment, with tangible objects, and a focus on exploring the environment and discovering clues. Clues can lead to puzzles; puzzles can lead to answers and answers can lead to further clues. After a series of these have been solved, teams can find a final code or answer, which can be used to complete the escape room (sometimes this is through unlocking a physical door).
The escape room idea is generally believed to be from the video game genre ‘escape the room’, where players find themselves in a locked room and are required to click on their surroundings, explore the environment, and find a way to escape. More advanced virtual escape rooms have since been created, using various programmes and platforms, with the ability to explore an online environment (Nicholson, 2015).
Why this idea?
With well-designed, appropriately challenging escape rooms, players instantly become active participants and develop learning on many levels, working collaboratively towards a shared goal (Veldkamp, Daemen et al., 2020). Desirable skills and qualities such as teamwork, creativity, leadership, communication, decision making, and critical thinking can all be fostered and developed (Fotaris & Mastoras, 2019). Pedagogies such as Inquiry-Based Learning, Scenario-Based Learning, Teams-Based Learning, Games-Based Learning can all be embedded within this methodology to create an engaging, fun, and stimulating activity (Makri et al., 2021). Escape rooms are naturally versatile, with the ability for them to be contextualised to different subject areas and have varied levels of complexity to suit the time required to complete and the level of student. Students can also design their own escape rooms, which can then be completed by other groups afterwards to promote peer to peer learning, creativity, and innovation.
How could others implement this idea?
So how can we create escape rooms? Similarly to curriculum design, the first step should be to establish what the overall intended learning outcome is, which provides a foundation and context to the puzzles and structure (Veldkamp, van de Grint et al., 2020). This may be a certain skill (e.g. communication, teamwork or decision-making) or a certain topic related to the curriculum. A series of puzzles, which link to each other, can then be designed. These can be in categories such as visual (e.g. examining images/surroundings to solve a puzzle), logic (e.g. using reasoning to identify a theme), physical (e.g. undoing a knot or searching an object), auditory (e.g. deciphering a sound), or combination (e.g. a mixture of these grouped together) (60OUT, 2019). Escape rooms ca