Educational Escape Room – Challenges and Obstacles

The purpose of this paper is to outline the designing and testing process of an educational escape room prepared by a team of international scientists participating in a research project. Its scope was to design the science-based escape room that could be used as an educational tool and support the dissemination of knowledge on the healthy lifestyle and healthy eating habits among the general population. Since games, in general, are one of the most engaging media, it was safe to assume that creating the escape room would involve participants in a way inaccessible to other teaching methods. The project team led by the Technion University and comprised of researchers from the University of Helsinki, the University of Reading, and the University of Warsaw joined by EUFIC, developed a structured approach to the escape room design and step by step resolved issues emerging during the process. Underway we encountered several challenges that made us question some of the assumptions we had made before the procedure commenced. Our main concerns were primarily the interculturality (or language dependence) of the escape room (five countries took part in the project) and its high difficulty level. As it turned out the former did not pose any design problems while the latter – unexpectedly – behaved counterintuitively: most players taking part in our tests managed to solve all the puzzles in less than a half of the pre-planned time and the record time was less than its quarter. This phenomenon was a result of a rather ‘safe’ approach to the puzzle design since we were more focused on knowledge dissemination. Although the entertainment value proved to be a clear asset of our escape room, it is yet to be decided whether it, in fact, supports the learning process or is just a simple distraction and offers nothing new to the table of modern teaching methods. The next step of the project is to refine the existing escape room design and venture further into the realm of educational escape rooms to try out new approaches and decide what type of content is best suited for use in such educational projects.