Escape rooms are a fairly new concept in education. It first started as a leisure activity, as the first real-life escape room was created in 2007 in Kyoto, Japan, with the aim to transport the sensation of playing an “escape the room” video game into the real world. The concept quickly boomed, and it did not take long before the educational potential of such a concept was recognised.

Escape rooms are based on the idea that your team is locked up in a room, and you must solve several puzzles to find the key to open the room. If the core substance remains the same in most escape room experiences, they can vary in many ways when it comes to their design. First of all, the plot can be centered around an extensive variety of topics, which means it can be adapted to many different academic subjects. The only limit is your imagination!

In order to fit the needs of the plot, the mission can also be adapted. For example, instead of finding the key to open a room, the players might be asked to find a missing object or person, to create something, or to solve a crime. Then, escape rooms can also differ through their format: from physical escape rooms to digital escape rooms, and other innovative formats such as card escape games – all of these formats have been developed in the 9 Escape Rooms for CCI project scenarios, which will be available soon. But no matter how different the final goals can be, an escape room’s quest will always involve discovering clues and solving tasks. Puzzles and enigmas offer great opportunities for teaching about a wide range of topics in a fun and engaging way. Escape rooms are part of Game-based learning, which we developed in our previous blog article. Due to the novelty of this teaching technique and the infinite possibilities of its applications, it is essential to develop material to help youth workers and educators understand how pedagogical escape rooms work so that they can enjoy all their benefits.

Although, as we mentioned earlier, escape rooms haven’t been utilised for educational purposes since recently, we can already find excellent examples of projects that show how they can be applied in the pedagogical field.  STEAMER is a European-funded project developed by partner organisations from Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Italy, and Latvia. It focuses on improving STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) education by creating a groundwork, tools, and examples of escape rooms adapted and bespoke to educators and teachers of secondary education. The groundwork for this project also includes a guide about using inclusive elements for students with Specific Learning Disorders to explain what kind of specific accommodations can help them with their learning difficulties.

However, the educational possibilities of Escape Rooms are not exclusive to schools. One area where they can be successfully used is to develop entrepreneurship skills in the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs). The CCIs are an industry where self-employment is more than common. To transform creative ideas into an entrepreneurial project, it is necessary to acquire a wide range of skills, such as networking, managing a budget, manipulating digital tools, and many more.

Escape Rooms for CCI is a project aimed at the above sector that creates informative resources and escape room scenarios. Our first project result is a guide for educators and youth workers that addresses the benefits of gamification in the learning process of entrepreneurship abilities in CCIs. In this guide, youth workers and educators can find all the necessary resources to create and implement their own educational escape rooms.

You can find the Guide on the Resources page of the project website and HERE (add link in every language). And stay tuned for the second project result: the 9 escape room scenarios for the CCIs!

Bibliography

Ascalon, A. (2022, June 22). The History of Escape Rooms (2021). Blog | The Escape Game. https://theescapegame.com/blog/the-history-of-escape-rooms/

Fotaris, P., & Mastoras, T. (2019). Escape Rooms for Learning: A Systematic Review. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Games Based Learning (pp. 235-243).

Nicholson, S. (2015). Peeking behind the locked door: A survey of escape room facilities. I