Escape Rooms for Learning
Escape Rooms for Learning
If you’ve ever found yourself trapped somewhere and need to get out, you’ve have probably been cursed with a misconnecting flight. But if you’ve chosen to be put in this situation then you are most likely participating in an escape room.
But what are escape rooms? What’s the story behind their origins and how can they be used for learning and education? This article will answer those questions and more as well as cover some of the key characteristics of escape rooms before diving into are how escape rooms can be used for applied learning.
The design of escape rooms for educational purposes will be covered as well as how teachers, trainers, and instructors can implement escape rooms for their learners. This implementation will be connected to the results of and outcomes of using escape rooms for educational purposes.
Specific examples of escape rooms for learning will be discussed as well as potential challenges that you as an applied games practitioner may run into with their use. The overall student experience of escape rooms will be covered in depth as well as two very different and distinct version of escape rooms that are gaining increasing traction: escape “boxes” and digital escape rooms.
However, we can’t start a discussion on how to use escape rooms for teaching and learning without first defining what they are.
What are Escape Rooms?
“Escape Rooms” can be called many things and have been referred to as escape games, puzzle rooms, or exit games. For the purposes of this article, we’ll refer to escape rooms as physical adventures in which players cooperate and work with one another to find clues in the space, solve puzzles in the pursuit of achieving a specific goal which is usually to “escape” the room within the time limit.
For many, escape rooms blend both thematic and immersive storytelling with collaborative problem solving. This in turn, provides engaging and thematic entertainment that can also educate and provide a venue for team building across wide demographics. Their popularity has grown to over 50,000 escape rooms around the world as of 2019.
For a very physical experience, escape rooms, draw their origin and inspiration from point-and-click PC games and other related digital experiences. Though modern escape rooms originate from these digital forms, contemporary examples are much more focused on the group experience and test players’ problem-solving ability, critical thinking, and teamwork across various different themes, locations, and genres.
Originally, escape rooms first emerged in Asia (notably Japan with Real Escape Games in 2007) and has since expanded to Hungary (ParaPark), Puzzle Break in the US and beyond.
Key Characteristics of Escape Rooms
Escape rooms come in many different forms, locations, and challenges, but they are all mostly unified through several key elements. They include game play between 2-10 people who are tasked with solving a variety of puzzles in a specific space. These puzzles could be based on math, logic, physical challenges, or on solving patterns or word problems.
In addition, escape rooms are usually also structured around a unifying theme. Whether that be storylines or premises, they are brought together by thematic props, staging, settings, lighting, and sometimes even actors who are meant to support the overall magic circle of the gaming space through their actions and influences.
While not present in all escape rooms, players can receive help from a game master for solving some in-room mechanics or progressing past certain stages of a puzzle. This is usually important for players as success or failure can result in different “good” or “bad” outcomes for the participating group and the role they embody in the escape room’s story.
Escape Rooms for Applied Learning
While all of these elements go into the underlying structure of escape rooms, they can also be used for teaching, training, learning, and development through their application in a pedagogical framework. That’s because the structure of escape rooms promotes player thinking, collaboration, and active learning.
Educational escape rooms take the underlying structure and reformat and re-theme it to help learners solve different puzzles that are based on some established learning outcome that needs to be completed within a time limit. This application is rising in popularly as the escape room format is highly experiential and allows learners to apply what they’ve learned in a structured environment that promotes their own mastery of concepts.
Escape rooms also supports constructivist-based principles where knowledge is created rather than communicated to learners in an active and experiential environment. This environment fosters deeper learning which others may not gain through traditional or didactic forms of learning which do not focus entirely on application.
This structure of escape rooms also fosters the cooperative dedication to solving the challenges of the room in a timed environment which meets the structure of the escape room experience while also mirroring the timed assessments of more traditional tests and quizzes. These formats are more familiar to administrators and educators and therefore the comparison between escape rooms and this traditional summative assessment is an easier connection to create.
This close correlation to traditional assessment goes hand in hand with the overall process of creating simplified escape room experiences which can be done at low-cost; high accessibility; and serves as an engaging alternative to other forms of instruction. The result of which is the creation of an environment where the application of theoretical knowledge meets the immediate feedback of an engaging and thematic experience.
Designing Educational Escape Rooms
Creating an engaging, challenging, and successful escape room is no easy feat. Doing so when you also have the added goal of learning in mind is even more difficult, but not impossible. Many educators can already use the tools and resources at their disposal for creating educational escape rooms. All that’s needed to get started is to establish clear educational goals, learning outcomes, and objectives and determine if how, when, and where you want your learners to be involved in the design process.
The best commercial escape rooms involve a compelling story, engaging environment, timed challenges, and puzzles of appropriate difficulty for participants. Educational escape rooms should aspire to include all this as well as a post-session debrief on the experience for learners.
Stories can be thematic interpretation of the content and materials (such as setting the escape room in ancient times) or be a realistic simulation of when and where students would use this knowledge (such as a hospital for medical students). Likewise, an engaging environment can mimic the theme of the room but must provide choices for players and agency for learners to make decisions within the confines of space and the magic circle. Puzzles of appropriate difficulty are perhaps the easiest asset for educators to create in educational escape rooms as they will directly rely on the content expertise of the instructors themselves. But the main challenge lies in adapting that content to a solvable puzzle in an appropriate format of the escape room.
This last point connects with educators creating formative assessments for learning. We mostly see these in activities like quizzes. However, escape room puzzles represent a different kind of assessment: one whose answer should help solve future “assessments” (i.e. puzzles) in the escape room. These puzzles should also be deliberately structured to encourage joint problem solving by participants. This is important to remember as the power of escape rooms is through collaborative cooperation and shared knowledge that is created (and tested) by participants.
Therefore, it is also a useful educational activity to have learners create the escape room for their peer learner to ensure that their puzzles appeal, are relevant, and engaging to their target audience. Whereas the instructor should focus on ensuring that it is educationally sound and an appropriate test for knowledge application.
As a practical consideration, it is also important to consider the overall length of the challenge and the amount of time given to solve it. Therefore incorporating 4-5 puzzles into a single educational escape rooms should help avoid fatigue for participants.
Implementing Escape Rooms for Learning
As was mentioned previously, escape rooms serve as a model for formative assessment for learners but can also represent summative assessments that test their applications of main course learning outcome at the completion of a session.
Application of educational escape rooms (as with other forms of experiential and games-based learning) is most useful when paired with debriefing activities for learners. These debriefing sessions emphasize a crucial phase of learning growth and understanding as they are challenged to reflect on their decisions, discuss outcomes, and internalize key insights gained throughout the process.
Debriefings also create a strong, positive feedback loop for participants where they are challenged to address their own performance and compare it against their team’s performance in the escape room. Such a metacognitive activity helps learners determine what worked, what didn’t, and how they might apply or improve their practice in the future.
For those ambitious educators who want to implement more than one escape room in their learning environments, they may do so over the course of a term starting with smaller single “puzzles” or challenges and gradually ramping up to full escape rooms as a type of anchor assessment.
Results and Outcomes of Educational Escape Rooms
There are many positive benefits to using escape rooms for teaching and learning that cross disciplines and include enhanced motivation, teamwork, and problem solving. This is due to escape rooms serving as a practical, hands-on, and experiential approach to learning.
Based on the approach of the instructor, escape rooms can serve as a means of a replication or simulation of a learning scenario – such as clinical situations for nursing or medical students. While it might be counter-intuitive to use escape rooms for medical learning outcomes, educators should examine how they might take assessments that they currently use and how they might be applied within the structure of an escape room format.
Such an approach takes advantage of the co-learning and collaborative aspects of escape room puzzles while also providing a means of thematic immersion: which can replicate or diverge from the learning content.
Applications of escape rooms for educational purposes also creates an environment where the application of knowledge is more fun, engaging, and intrinsically motivating. These outcomes are served by Dee Fink’s Taxonomy on Significant Learning though the application of scaled foundational knowledge, application of critical thinking, and integration with real-life scenarios when designed in tandem with educator input.
Overall, escape rooms represent an effective and scalable model (within reason) that serves as a low-cost but high impact instructional strategy in a traditional learning environment. Most of all, the cooperative learning environment is one that fosters perseverance for learners as they rely and work with other peers through an assessment that does not require direct guidance from teachers.
Examples of Escape Rooms for Learning
Escape rooms for learning can be used in many different formats, classes, contexts, and disciplines. However, some of the most successfully implemented escape rooms for learning have been constructed for fields in medical education. Escape rooms in this area of learning have covered everything from infection prevention, patient safety, medication protocols and hospital procedures. These were constructed in the aforementioned escape room format with puzzles that needed to be solved collaboratively, but were thematically designed as patient scenarios with clues.
Other disciplines that have designed effective escape rooms for learning have been the hard sciences such as chemistry where puzzles required players to solve challenges involving molecular weight, pH calculations, and chromatography.
Escape rooms are not a traditional form of instruction, and deciding to use them for teaching and learning is an investment in time, patience, and resources. However, those learners who have used them reported that the activity helped them demonstrate and apply their knowledge. This is compared to other traditional forms of assessment which may require only recall of declarative information.
Challenges of Escape Rooms for Learning
The overall cost in resources represents one of the challenges for educators wishing to use escape rooms for learning. One of the most salient of those costs is the time needed to envision, design, and implement the room. This labor-intensive endeavor is often what makes application for many learning contexts cost prohibitive.
Another factor is that the contemporary applications of escape rooms is very much based on a physical format. That is, students who are told that this class will involve an “escape room” will expect to see a robust physical challenge. Therefore, those who teach in modalities that are outside of the traditional in-person format and who wish to use escape rooms for learning must adapt them: usually outside of the expectation of their students.
Additional challenges associated with escape rooms include the small number of participants (usually capped at 10), difficulties in addressing and balancing the challenges, and overall budget limitations for the resources needed to construct these activities.
Student Experience with Educational Escape Rooms
Escape rooms for learning should be applied in ways that are both interesting and engaging for learners. So, the individual player experience matters a lot in how these escape rooms are used for education. When done right, they can increase student engagement and active participation.
Not surprising, learners who experienced educational escape rooms cited “time” as a recurring theme which directly relates to the timed practice of escape room activities and the necessities of collaborative problem solving to pass these challenges.
It’s also worthwhile to highlight that many learners will never have experienced a traditional escape room before they encounter an educational one. So, it’s important (like other games used for learning) that there be an on-boarding process for both how escape rooms work and how this connects to learning outcomes. Those students that know how and why they are used will most likely find a positive application for their learning.
Conversely, there will also be differences in students who have played escape rooms before, have advanced theoretical or applicable knowledge of the content, or a combination of both. Therefore, these more advanced learners may have advantages compared to other students. Despite that, it’s wise to indicate that escape rooms are challenges that are best addressed collaboratively (and not against) others to achieve the common goal.
Escape Boxes for Learning
While escape rooms are more widely known in the popular community, there are also smaller, more portable, and more accessible challenges known as escape boxes.
Escape boxes are classroom friendly adaptations of escape rooms that integrate both physical and digital puzzles to replicate the same kinds of challenges and experiences from a traditional escape room. Like their traditional counterparts, escape boxes are aligned with curricular goals and learning outcomes and share much of the same objectives in developing reasoning, communication, and teamwork between participants.
However, compared to traditional escape rooms, escape boxes are meant to be smaller, portable, and quick to set up and dismantle which aids in their ability to be deployed in different physical locations. Despite their smaller form, they can still include many of the more advanced elements of traditional escape rooms such as tactile puzzles, digital screens, sounds, and props.
Digital Escape Rooms for Learning
In addition to escape boxes, escape rooms have come full circle with digital escape rooms that revisit their origins as point-and-click interactive games. These digital escape rooms embody much of the same outcomes of their physical counterparts in their ability to instill engagement and collaboration with other learners.
Though the main difference between physical escape rooms and digital escape rooms are that the latter are produced and experienced in digital formats. This venue provides an opportunity for participants to view, and action pre-set digital hints that follow a structured narrative that still supports learner autonomy.
Iterations of digital escape rooms included learners working randomly in assigned pairs
and communicating via a conference platform like Zoom. The instructors in this case, used a combination of Google Docs and Google Forms that simulated different “rooms” and sections of the “room” and the puzzles contained within it. Pairs of students were encouraged to communicate, collaborate and cooperate with each other to solve all puzzles and eventually complete the challenge.
While digital escape rooms still required significant effort to create and implement, their positive outcomes are beneficial for educators who wish to apply the benefits of traditional escape rooms but through a different format. Though, digital implementations are not without its shortcomings as this format could make it easier for learners to “cheat” or undermine the integrity of the puzzle since they are not as easily monitored compared to physical escape rooms.
Takeaways
This article covered escape rooms for learning and began with an introduction of escape rooms, discussing their origins, and key characteristics. Escape rooms for applied learning were covered as well as individual steps to consider when designing educational escape rooms.
Implementation of escape rooms for learning were discussed in addition to the results that such escape rooms can have for learning outcomes. Different examples of escape rooms for learning were shared in addition to stated challenges of using escape rooms for education.
Finaly, the article closed on the different student experiences of educational escape rooms as well as two different modalities that could be used for instruction. The first were escape boxes where there are physical representations that are more portable and accessible than their larger counterparts. The other are digital escape rooms which revisit their origins as point-and-click interactive games from their earliest beginnings on personal computers.
This article covered escape rooms. To learn more about gamification, check out the free course on Gamification Explained.
Dave Eng, EdD
Principal
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Cite this Article
Eng, D. (2025, July 15). Escape Rooms for Learning. Retrieved MONTH DATE, YEAR, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2025/7/7/escape-rooms-for-learning
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