Educational Escape Room: Break Dalton’s Code and Escape!

In the contemporary landscape of science education, teachers aspire to implement approaches that engage students with diverse teaching methods in diverse learning environments. By reviewing educational literature that deals with chemical escape rooms (ChEsRms), we can find several purposes they serve; however, only a few papers used ChEsRms for assessing student’s knowledge and 21st century skills. The “Escape Room-based Educational Assessment” (EREA) has been built, at the Faculty of Education in our institution, to serve high-school chemistry teachers and their students as an alternative learning and assessment environment. A variety of puzzles are described in this activity paper. The escape room is equipped with cameras that record students’ work while solving the puzzles, and at the same time, they can be observed by their teachers from a control room. Teachers were asked to provide feedback on the activity and specify which puzzles required the implementation of significant chemical knowledge, high order thinking skills (analysis, synthesis, or evaluation), and thinking creatively, for their solution. Based on the teachers’ perception, the skills required while solving the puzzles were mapped. Teachers addressed a variety of aspects: (a) domain specific skills in chemistry such as the implementation and synthesis of chemical knowledge, (b) scientific practices such as question posing and problem solving, and (c) 21st century skills such as collaboration, taking initiative, and creativity.