Designing and delivering escape rooms: reflections from a multidisciplinary group of educators

Since their introduction in Japan back in 2007, escape rooms have become hugely popular around the world. As well as being fun and engaging, escape rooms give players the opportunity to develop skills including problem solving, teamwork and critical thinking. In higher education, escape rooms have been used to support the learning of students across a broad range of disciplines including physiology, education and languages.

We are a group of educators from different disciplines across two universities in Aberdeen with a shared interest in educational escape rooms. We began meeting regularly in order to discuss contextualised practice and encourage each other to learn from our diverse experiences. We each independently reflected on our experiences before and after delivering our educational escape rooms using a series of guiding questions. These included “Who are your learners?”, “What are you hoping to achieve with your escape rooms?” and “Is there anything you thought worked particularly well?”. Leading on from this, we identified the common themes from our reflections.

In this talk, we will share our top tips for educators looking to design and deliver educational escape rooms.