Digital Escape Room

Escape rooms are immersive scenarios or story-based games where the players become a part of the game or scenario by solving puzzles or discovering clues to advance through the storyline. Traditionally, the goal of these games was to ‘escape’ from a locked room; however, these games have evolved to include other plots, including solving mysteries, treasure hunting, saving lives, or breaking into a vault. The development and diversity of educational escape rooms have accelerated steeply in the last several years, including in-person and digital escape rooms. We have developed several digital escape rooms for students in the Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) and Dental Hygiene (DH) programs at the University of Alberta. These digital escape rooms are excellent tools for reviewing concepts and formative assessment.

Developing an escape room for education

The following basic steps can be applied to design and develop an educational escape room.

Establish learning objectives

For the escape room. E.g., review the bones of the skull

Write questions

That would help evaluate whether objectives are achieved. E.g., identify bone from picture/ description

Create a story/narrative (the scenario)

Integrate question

Into the narrative as tasks/activities (the locks).

Provide hints

Or clues to manage difficulty.

Make it competitive

Or rewarding/fun (the escape)

Debrief

Resources for creating digital educational escape rooms

These online resources can help you get started with making an educational escape room.

Beyond The Chalk Talk