Justification for escape room
Before we begin, let’s start with some justification for why an escape room is an appropriate activity for teaching and learning. This may seem strange to consider, but after running several escape rooms at my institution I encountered management that raised questions about the educational implications of escape rooms and whether they were a valid form of learning. Since you are reading this book, you are likely already on board, but you may also encounter colleagues or management who may not feel the same way.
Here are some top reasons why escape rooms are a great strategy for teaching and learning:
- Enhancing engagement: An escape room can create an immersive and engaging learning experience. These elements add excitement and intrigue, and encourage active participation from all students.
- Promoting problem-solving skills: The use of puzzles and clues within the escape room encourages critical thinking and problem-solving skills among students. It challenges them to collaborate, strategize, and think creatively to unlock clues.
- Interactive and memorable learning experience: The escape room concept provides a hands-on and interactive learning experience. Students can directly engage with the content in a fun and memorable way, fostering deeper understanding and retention of teaching methodologies.
- Team building and collaboration without knowing it’s group work: Students often hate group work, but an escape room disguises the negative connotations of group work into something more light hearted. Collaborative efforts are needed in solving escape room challenges. By participating in this activity, students can strengthen teamwork and collaboration skills, which can be adapted into other team group activities.
- Innovative teaching tool: In this guide, we’ll be going over ways to integrate educational technologies into escape rooms which allows students and faculty to become more familiar with new and existing education technologies. The activities can be easily adapted to using any technology your school has!
