Two strangers lie awake on opposite corners of a decrepit bathroom, chained by their ankles to a pipe. A corpse lies on the floor between them. Taped messages relay to the horrified captives that they must escape or suffer a gruesome fate. Trying desperately but failing to sever the chains with hacksaws, they realize the crude implements are meant for human bones. Their own, to be precise.
This grisly premise of the torture thriller Saw set imaginations alight and helped fuel, in part, the exploding popularity of escape rooms over the last decade. While varying in theme and design, the basic premise is fairly constant: participants must solve a series of puzzles within a limited time to get out of an enclosed space.
Like many games, escape rooms blend challenge, engagement, and collaboration — the very things that make learning more effective. So it’s not surprising that a few teachers have found ways to adapt the escape room formula to walk students through curriculum. And in doing so, they seem to have hit upon a powerful teaching method that keeps students engaged and helps them remember what they learned.
WWhile films like Saw played a part, many who have turned escape rooms into a career cite popular interactive digital games in the 1980s and 90s as their inspiration. These include role-playing games (e.g., Dungeons & Dragons) point-and-click adventure games (Myst or Monkey Island) and ‘escape the room’ games (The Crimson Room), in which players discover and combine items to solve puzzles.
For library technology specialists Brian Mayer and Liesl Toates, what matters most when creating educational escape rooms are good puzzles and strong narrative. Great learning experiences aren’t dependent on spending big, and constraints like limited classroom space can be worked around. Ready-made escape room kits, such as those made by Breakout EDU, also help.
Take Dr. Nickelby’s Lab, a steampunk escape room Mayer and Toates designed for middle schoolers. Students find themselves trapped in a leaking underwater bunker; as they play, they unravel the broader story of a lab professor desperate to travel back in time to Victorian England to save his daughter. Students explore a virtual arena built on Minecraft, the computer game, before moving to a physical classroom to solve clues they found online. There, they might use the Pythagorean theorem to open a door, or calculate the volume of a sphere to power a time portal.
Other educational escape rooms, like Science Detectives: Training Room Escape, are purely web-based experiences.
Whether online, offline, or both, and whatever the desired learning objective — math, history, abstract logic, physical agility, word patterns, or teamwork — escape rooms can be adapted to almost any type of challenge or content. The only real limit is imagination.
IIt’s not just educators touting escape rooms for their ability to teach skills like team work, problem solving, and knowledge retention. Science also makes a convincing case to use them.
Numerous studies show that students are more likely to retain knowledge if they actually apply what they’ve learned. This is known as active learning, an approach that emphasizes higher-order thinking. It’s contrasted with passive, lecture-style education where the teacher does most of the talking. By immersing players in an intellectually stimulating, collaborative, and hands-on environment, well-designed escape rooms can provide a veritable smorgasbord of active learning. Add the pressure of a ticking clock, and just the right amount of stress is created to make us function slightly above average.
The substantial benefits of active learning play out on a cellular level as well.
Whenever we learn something new, the neurons in our brain responsible for coding different parts of that information start firing at the same time. That is, they release electrical or chemical signals via the connections, or synapses, that join them. The more neurons fire together, the stronger the synaptic connections become, meaning that we retain the knowledge more effectively.
Active learning enhances this process by stimulating multiple neural connections. For instance, strategizing to save Dr. Nickelby by solving a set of interconnected problems activates executive functions in the prefrontal cortex. Working in groups to escape a slowly flooding lab engages the social, emotional, auditory, and motor networks. The more areas of the brain are simultaneously activated, the more the centrally-located hippocampus facilitates connections between different clusters of neurons. This allows new knowledge to be embedded more deeply in the brain, making it much more likely to stick.
Educators who have experienced escape rooms are on board. Scientists are on board. Even horror movie producers may be on board.
The real question is, can escape rooms scale? With strapped school budgets and overstretched teachers, is it possible for an education tool developed from a Blockbuster franchise to take off? What kinds of resources are needed to help students of all backgrounds experience math puzzles and history lessons disguised as murder mysteries?
[Editor’s note: Check out the below response to this story in Cogniss Magazine]
