Is it possible to use escape rooms for educational purposes?

Most of the time an escape room is widely seen as a form of pure entertainment or team building experience for corporate events. However, if you look at its core, every escape room challenge has many things in common. They require teamwork, and they definitely require the brain to work. This means they are effective means of testing or cementing knowledge in an efficient way.

We look forward to new ways of learning.

Escape rooms as educational tools

That means you can easily optimize escape rooms and make them more interesting for just about any age. So yes, this can be very useful for history teachers that want to encourage kids to learn more about a certain era. They can also be suitable for math classes since you can add various math-themed puzzles required to solve the door.

Escape Room Era understands the true benefit of escape rooms for people of any age.

That’s the reason why we decided to create an escape room at the Fullerton College for the Chemistry Department.

One of the professors there decided to create chemistry-themed escape room that students would have to complete in order to win. But this was only the beginning, now all chemistry students eventually play the escape room. So now the Fullerton College students find it a lot easier to combine fun and knowledge thanks to their great educational escape room. It’s a very distinct, exciting project that brings in front rewarding results and experiences!

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Students actively solving puzzles in the escape lab.

The benefits of Escape Rooms for students

One of the major educational escape room benefits is that students get to work together. They get to eliminate all the anxiety and potentially uncomfortable situations, instead they connect and talk with one another. They also get to express their ideas and actively figure out the right solution for the situation at hand.

In addition, the escape rooms are designed to help students test their knowledge and improve it with new and creative things as well. Similarly, students evaluate their personal problem-solving skills, time management, and teamwork focus. All of these are extremely important towards their education. But at the same time they are life skills that will make students a lot more comfortable when it comes to working with a team. They will know how to make the most out of the entire process and actively focus on generating the best results in no time.

Sometimes people use mnemonics for packaging a lot of information into a small phrase or word that can be easily drawn out for later use. Such as ABC's of CPR for airway, breathing, and circulation. But people usually never forget what happened to them when something paramount happens during their lives. Not to say playing an escape room will be life changing, but it is definitely an experience to remember!

People are extremely effective at remembering information when it is linked to specific events.

As you can see, an escape room has amazing benefits for all students. So yes, it can easily be used for educational purposes as well as entertainment. The fact that you can set up a themed escape room or customize all puzzles means these rooms are extremely easy to adapt to the educational process. If you’re looking for a way to make the learning process easier for students, then adding an escape room experience to your school is well worth the effort. The Fullerton College already did that, and they are extremely happy with the payoff. So how well are these students learning from education based escape rooms? We would say they are learning it the best way!

If you'd like to read about the published journal from the Escape Room at Fullerton college here is the link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jchemed.8b00831

In the future, we plan on designing and making kits that colleges or schools can use to help educate their students.