Escape Room- STEM challenge India-Scotland

This link will take you to an Escape Room challenge we created through a collaboration between University of Glasgow, School of Education and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER Pune). We challenge you too!

This escape room is an adaptation and the outcome of a knowledge exchange between the authors Gabriella Rodolico @DrRodolico and Peter Donaldson, and Sarah Honeychurch, Matt Offord and their student intern and collaborator Amy Cairns who created the original file.

One of the most recent effective Problem Based Learning strategies based on gamification is the ‘Escape Room’ (Pearcy et al., 2019). The educational version is based on players who have to collaborate to achieve an educational goal in order to complete the “game” in a time constrained manner within a scenario created by educators and related to the intended learning outcomes (Veldkamp, et al., 2020). Recent evidence suggests it not only enhances engagement but also motivation in several Higher Education courses (Dugnol-Menéndez, et al., 2021; Veldkamp, et al., 2020). Escape rooms can also enhance learning processes and leadership skills in student teams (Järveläinen, and Paavilainen-Mäntymäki, 2019; Warmelink et al., 2017). It might be argued that this may be true only on a face-to-face basis, however a recent review on Digital Educational Escape Rooms (DEER) showed that “DEERs are innovative, promising, immersive, active, and collaborative instructional approaches that can guide and shape learning achievements more greatly than traditional educational methodologies” (Makri, et al., 2021, p.18)

In other words, both traditional face-to-face escape rooms and their digital counterparts, are considered a student-centered strategy where the requirement to work collaboratively to gain “freedom” can promote student engagement (Premo and Davis, 2018).