Converting Course Material to Educational Escape Room Formats

Background

Educational escape rooms, as described in this chapter have their roots in table-top forms of recreational escape rooms. The history of recreational escape rooms is relatively recent. In 2007, the first in-person recreational escape room began and quickly spread around the world (Nicholson, 2015). Currently there are tens of thousands of recreational escape rooms spread across over 50 different countries (Ferguson, 2019). These in-person games were preceded by adventure-based computer games of a similar genre like Crimson Room and Myst (Bartlett & Anderson, 2019)

The basic premise of recreational escape rooms is that a group of participants need to solve puzzles to unlock a series of solutions and escape from a room within a specified time interval (Wiemker et al., 2015). Each room has a narrative storyline which the participants work within. Common storylines include prison breaks, horror, detective, and virus outbreaks. Although they are referred to as an ‘escape room’, many contain several adjoining rooms each with puzzles and locks to unlock. Studies indicate the recreational escape room clientele are an approximately equal mix of males and females and have been used as corporate team bonding, date nights and as a fun activity among friends (Nicholson, 2015).