Escape Room Design as a Game-Based Learning Process for STEAM Education

By combining elements of entertainment with creative writing, theater and technology, the increasingly popular live-action games escape rooms have the potential to improve the learning experience when used in academic settings. However, since educational escape rooms are still an emerging field, there is limited literature available about their use in STEAM education. The present paper addresses this issue by describing the methods followed by 39, 16 to 18-year-old, students and 10 teachers at a Vocational School of Greece to implement a STEAM-focused escape room activity using the Experiential Pyramid Model. The escape room was themed after the Spanish heist television series “La Casa de Papel” and incorporated creative writing, theatrical elements, and technology, such as Robotics, QR codes and Virtual Reality (VR), to promote communication, teamwork and peer learning. To make the experience more immersive, two team members had the roles of non-player characters (NPCs), and interacted with the players throughout the game, with a small script written during the design and evaluation phase. This collaborative activity was assessed via evaluation questionnaires, direct/participatory observation and interviews. The first results indicated that students were highly engaged and motivated especially at the design phase. They valued this pedagogical approach positively, since it facilitated the integration of contents of various subjects and enabled them to collaborate with their peers from different cohorts, thus promoting peer learning. This study aims to provide educators with an example of how they might develop and support non-traditional approaches to learning by immersing their students as active participants in the learning environment and allowing them to develop and apply knowledge, so to create a gameplay.