Increasing Engagement With Engineering Escape Rooms

Although games are intrinsically engaging, standard educational practices are not necessarily. So, gamification and game-based learning within education is a topic of interest. In this article, we use the popular escape room concept within an engineering education environment using a physical hardware decoder box. We outline a collection of four sets of puzzles, which we have used to increase engagement, with four different sets of participants within the engineering department: faculty, international students, high school students, and undergraduate students. Our results indicate that the escape room learning paradigm is well received by participants. They report high levels of engagement and motivation as a result of the activity.