Embracing ‘gameful learning’ with escape room games in higher education

Our research indicates that escape room games offer a novel context for participants with intriguing and challenging scenarios (incentive dimension) that require students to work as a team to communicate and collaborate (interaction dimension) in order to find opportunities to apply their collective skills or knowledge (content dimension), which results in an enjoyable gameful experience (incentive dimension) that prompts them to find more knowledge or skills (content dimension). Hence, gameful learning is a central part of the success of escape room games as they promote a synergistic effect. Our research suggests that escape rooms are powerful educational tools because they engage all three learning dimensions in Ileris’ framework of learning. Moreover, these three dimensions work synergistically ( Figure 6 ). Figure 6. Application of the Ileris’ Framework to design escape rooms. The strengths of this study are the large number of student respondents and that the study was conducted across multiple programmes and faculties within a large public university. Both student and educator perspectives were explored. The limitations of this study are: the data are limited to a single year of data collection currently and the data is self-reported. Regarding whether learning had occurred, our study did not link surveys to assessment; that is, we did not compare student perceptions of their learning to actual performance (final grade or subsequent lab grade). Such comparison was not achievable because the student debriefing surveys were anonymous. However, educator perspectives were used to corroborate the students’ perceived learning.