Unlocking Student Engagement: Creation, Adaptation, and Application of an Educational Escape Room Across Three Pharmacy Campuses

Abstract

Background. Educational escape rooms are positively received by students, increase knowledge, and serve as a platform for the active application of teamwork and team-based communication. Aim. This article focuses on detailing an educational escape room that is adaptable and transferable for use with any course or discipline. Methods. Puzzles are created around the educational objectives of the course or unit. Puzzles include ciphers, jumbles, coded messages, combination locks, rebuses, and data hunts. Students work in teams to solve content-specific puzzles to escape a room. Teams which solve all of the puzzles in the allotted time are considered to have successfully escaped the room. Gameplay can range from 60 to 75 minutes. Facultyled debriefing is an important part of the educational innovation. Results and Conclusion. This escape room uses collaborative learning to increase student knowledge and skills in educational content. The learning experience is enhanced through dynamic student engagement with the focused topic. This topic can easily be changed to a different course topic and the corresponding gameplay puzzles adapted and transferred for use with a variety of disciplines. This manuscript details the transferability of the educational escape room to 3 campuses and provides insight for successful implementation.

Shocking Escape: A Cardiac Escape Room for Undergraduate Nursing Students

“…Cardiovascular content is some of the most challenging for undergraduate nursing students to master. Educational escape rooms have been shown to increase student content knowledge, immerse students in learning, and facilitate soft skill growth (Adams et al, 2018; Borrego et al, 2017; Caldas et al, 2019; Eukel et al, 2020; Kavanaugh et al, 2020; Morrell & Ball, 2020; Morrell & Eukel, 2020; Morrell et al, 2020; Wu et al, 2018; Zhang et al, 2018). One faculty member, BM, designed a cardiac-themed nursing escape room to engage students in learning, help students identify areas of weakness, and build collaborative interaction with classmates.…”

Evaluating an Educational Escape Room Conducted Remotely for Teaching Software Engineering

“…The capacity of educational escape rooms to boost students' motivation and enhance their learning has made them an increasingly popular teaching activity in a wide range of areas. Prior research has examined the use of educational escape rooms in several fields, including nursing [11]- [13], medicine [14]- [17], [32], physiotherapy [18], pharmacy [23]- [28], [33], science [30], physics [34], chemistry [20], [21], [35]- [38], biology [31], [39], cryptography [19], programming [22], [29], and computer networks [40]. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that there is a dearth of research addressing the use of educational escape rooms for teaching software engineering fundamentals and, specifically, for teaching software modeling, a topic of crucial importance that every software engineering fundamentals course must cover [41], [42].…”

Ensuring Educational Escape-Room Success: The Process of Designing, Piloting, Evaluating, Redesigning, and Re-Evaluating Educational Escape Rooms

“…The implementation of educational escape rooms in higher education has shown great value in learner outcomes, perceptions, and engagement (Adams et al, 2018; Borrego et al, 2017; Eukel et al, 2020; Eukel et al, 2017; Morrell & Ball, 2020; Morrell & Eukel, 2020). Educational escape rooms can contribute to student engagement, cooperation, and content mastery and enhance an in-person classroom format (Monaghan & Nicholson, 2017; Nicholson, S., 2015; Veldkamp et al, n.d.).…”