Educational Innovation to Address Climate Change Issues: The Emerging Trend of (Online) Escape Rooms

Introduction

This is the example of a scenario in an escape room, a live-action team-based game where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in order to achieve a specific goal in a limited time (Nicholson, 2015). The cocktail of time pressure, the puzzles, creativity and collaboration is the reason why this has become a popular activity among colleagues and groups of friends all around the world. Especially in times of pandemic, the concept of escape rooms has been transferred to digital environments. An online escape room is a virtual version of an escape room, in which you enter a digital room that you can see on your screen on your computer. You don’t gather information by searching with your hands, but by clicking on the images in your browser. You can’t see your colleagues or friends standing in the room, but you will hear them talk through the video conferencing platform and you will exchange information this way and through the chat. Usually escape rooms have a certain theme or story that they are telling. It gives more depth and color to the experience.

In recent years, we have seen an emerging trend: the application of recreational escape rooms to educational purposes to engage students in their learning environment, and encourage both hard skills and soft skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, communication and leadership. This trend also applies to higher education, that perhaps as a reaction to an environment of increasing “performativity” and “instrumentalism”, has experienced a growing interest in this type of educational innovation practices.

Climate change, and global warming as one of the main indicators, has been a recurrent topic for escape rooms. Educating on climate change brings challenges: it is a complex topic to understand for young people, not only for the huge steps that have to be made among different sectors of society, but also for the nature of climate change itself, seen as a slowly progressing force, hardly noticeable and unpredictable (González-Gaudiano & Meira-Cartea, 2009). In addition, we are surrounded by misinformation and have difficulties to distinguish credible sources.

Several studies have suggested that many education efforts might have failed to raise interest and literacy on the topic of climate change, and not necessarily because of little information being available, but because of the way information is conveyed (Moser, 2010, Cooper, 2011). Teaching is successful only when learning -a change in behavior- is achieved, and for that purpose, effective strategies need to be put in place by covering the cognitive, affective and behavioral factors that corresponds to the “head, heart and hands model” (Eze & Nwagu, 2021).