Escape Rooms in STEM Teaching and Learning—Prospective Field or Declining Trend? A Literature Review

Abstract

In the last decade, game-based learning has received growing attention in educational contexts in general and science education in particular. A recent game trend, which has also found its way into STEM classrooms, is escape rooms. In this type of game, players have to work through several puzzles to achieve a specific goal (mostly to escape from an actual room). We conducted a systematic literature review to find out whether the “market” for such games is already saturated or if there is still potential for further development. After searching the common databases (ERIC, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, as well as the German database FIS Bildung), we analyzed 93 journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers in English and German from the following domains: chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, computer science, general science (interdisciplinary), environmental science, and medicine. We selected the ones that targeted a specific educational level (primary, secondary or tertiary education) and were designed for formal educational settings. It transpired that there is a need for more easily adaptable escape rooms as well as for more empirical evidence on their actual effects.

Teacher Perceptions on Virtual Reality Escape Rooms for STEM Education

“…Digital educational escape rooms have been implemented mainly in 2D, web-based environments, and are considered an appropriate tool to promote deeper subject comprehension in online distance learning [26]. Escape rooms in STEM disciplines are predominantly structured around the application of clinical and procedural skills in simulated contexts [30].…”

Preface for the Special Issue “Trends in Educational Gamification: Challenges and Learning Opportunities”

“…The interest in research on GBL approaches has been continuously growing in the last decade. Particularly, since 2013, gamification in education has become a vivid and quickly developing area of research, with hundreds of new relevant publications coming out every year [1,2].…”

Brazilian and Spanish Mathematics Teachers’ Predispositions towards Gamification in STEAM Education

“…The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the 1990s formalised the acronym STEM concerning the four areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics [11]. Afterward, STEAM Education emerged as a new pedagogy during the Americans for the Arts-National Policy Roundtable discussion in 2007 "to help counterbalance the increased focus on STEM subjects and the decline in arts education in the U.S." [10] (p. 32).…”

“…Studies and experiences with escape rooms have also proliferated [30][31][32], which again present the same problem: it creates great expectations when used for the first time, but since we cannot repeat it, once its features become known, it loses the initial potential for motivation. This type of activity also has the disadvantage of requiring much work to be prepared, and then it is hard to be adapted to other students or other contents.…”