Educational Escape Games: enhancing critical competencies

Practical Examples of How Escape Mail Supports Competency-Based Curriculum

Communication and Collaboration

1. Keeping in mind that Escape Mail is best solved in a small group of 2-4, the need for communication becomes vitally important. Participants must gather information either by reading, listening, watching, or physically touching various elements of our escape games. This information is either encrypted, incomplete, or simply not yet understood. Participants must communicate and transfer information they have found either vocally (by simply explaining what they have discovered), visually (by writing down what they have discovered either in writing or graphically) or non-verbally (by demonstrating or manipulating one of the various components of a puzzle), not only to their teammates, but also into the various modes of input to solve the puzzles.

2. The nature of solving the Escape Mail puzzles is that there are several ways of viewing and solving the problem, but there is always a clear and definitive right or wrong answer. The user receives immediate validation as to whether they have accurately transmitted the information. This fact supports concrete and immediate validation of success within a team setting while also allowing for multiple types of learning to succeed.

3. Participants are given the opportunity to practice strategies for effective communication. This is often difficult for students at the beginning, but given that there are consecutive challenges, students are provided several opportunities to refine their strategies to attain greater collaboration and increase their success in the collaborative problem solving activity.

SELF-EFFICACY

1. Escape Rooms require participants to engage in order to succeed. Both the time limit and consecutive, sequential puzzles necessitate a heightened form of engagement. As participants play, they are validated in their efforts by checkpoints throughout the game, often “rewarding” the participant through the release of new information. This “reward” is an objective and concrete validation that instills belief and confidence in the participant(s). Often, teams will celebrate after solving a puzzle, feeling more motivated to participate further, inspired by their own abilities and congratulatory toward one another.

2. It is not uncommon - and is almost always the case - for teams playing escape games to feature different kinds of learners. Some are more vocal than others, but without exception, the best teams are made of the participants who focus. The engaging nature of the escape games generates deep engrossment of participants while playing an escape game and lends itself to noticing finer details or concepts that might have gone unnoticed to the unengaged or uninterested. These details are often necessary to making further deductions or solving future puzzles.

3. Since no one playing the escape games knows how the problem will be solved, there is a democratization between the participants that recognizes all participants may (and will) at some point face failure. Often, the more failures means the more attempts and the greater the chance of future success. Players and teams that manage their stress well, are able to avoid blaming and shaming, and instead offer alternative solutions, or build off of a component of a wrong answer to arrive at a correct one. Escape games create an engaging enough experience to simulate a real world scenario, but is of course still only a game - an excellent training ground for deep learning.

CRITICAL THINKING AND PROBLEM SOLVING

1. There may be no other game more effective in producing critical thinking and problem solving than that of the escape game. The entire premise of the genre of escape games is to solve a problem. This is without exception. In nearly every escape game, participants are provided with all the information one needs to escape. This fact makes the game so terribly tricky and yet enticing. “All” that a participant must do is to think critically: reason a best course of action, make judgments regarding the evidence provided, and solve the problem.

2. Inevitably, through the course of solving an escape game, a participant or team hits a “wall” in their thinking process. They have tried “all” the solutions they can think of, and the evidence, as it is presented, does not garner a desired solution. At this point, strong teams exercise the discipline of thinking differently, approaching the problem from a new angle, and doing things differently. Some teams will do this by choosing to access a hint or clue from outside help (gamemaster), while others are able to exercise their autonomy and choose to think differently through a number of learned mechanisms. This actually gets harder to do for many adults as we become ingrained in a certain way of thinking.

3. Escape games often are not age appropriate. In our case, Mobile Escape has always existed to awaken wonder in all people, but especially in youth. Therefore, we have never utilized a theme or storyline in our escape games that promotes gore or horror in order to attract the thrill-seeking crowd. Our programs have always been suitable for kids, and at the same time, appealing to adults. We’ve also been able - in every single product we’ve made - to scale the difficulty of our games in one way or another; whether it is through increased number and/or nature of hints or even through the exchanging of easier components within the experience.

Creativity and Imagination

1. To solve an escape game participants are forced to use their imaginations to view challenging puzzles in unique ways in order to find hidden patterns, and make connections between various pieces that make up the game. From there, participants must be creative, or generative, in order to come up with a solution to solve the problem at hand.

2. The ability to form a mental image of something in one’s mind is extremely helpful in solving an escape game. If a participant is able to visualize information mentally, they can overlay or compare that information to what they are presently working on. Since a participant does not know the means of escaping or solving a puzzle, having the ability to creatively imagine possible ways - using parts of evidence given - is an advantage and is rewarded by success. An imaginative person, without hands-on or communicated creativity, is not as helpful to the group as the actionable, creative person who, using imagination as a starting point, can then perceive patterns, make connections and generate real-world solutions. Our escape games are often designed with puzzles that are tiered in difficulty, starting with easier puzzles and concluding with more challenging ones. Because of this intentional design, participants are increasingly challenged in their thinking throughout the course of our escape games which helps to expand the perceived limits of one’s creativity and thinking skills.

Citizenship

1. Escape games are microcosms of community. People gather - sometimes as strangers but often in pre-existing relationships - with a shared goal or intent. The group may already have a strong identity, or it may not, but regardless, individuals begin to assert themselves in the group context thereby changing the dynamic. The way in which someone asserts themself has a large impact on the success of the group apart from whether or not an idea is helpful or correct. For example, if a group has no leader and struggles to communicate, then ideas are not shared and no information cross-pollinates. Sometimes a group will have a vocal person who acts in a leadership role but does not act in a way that the group values, thereby demotivating or aggravating other group members. These kinds of behaviour serve to slow the group’s progress. This phenomenon is seen regularly in escape games.

2. Inevitably, as groups try solutions incorrectly, opportunities for controversy present themselves. The way in which a group navigates this controversy has a direct impact on their success. If a group resorts to blaming and shaming, they will often fail. If they illogically validate incorrect ideas, they will also fail. The group must learn to respect the ideas of others, critiquing constructively, and moving forward through conflict decisively.

Digital Literacy

1. Our escape games feature differing levels of digital engagement, depending on the game. In some of our games, access to the internet is provided in the game and participants are informed they will need to access “outside information” which is not always characteristic of escape games. In other instances, the game itself takes place - in part - online, and various codes are inputted and validated online. The game proceeds through digital videos, photos, sounds and information released online.

Learning to Learn

1. Someone who plays multiple escape games starts to recognize their strengths in specific areas: finding information, synthesizing information, imagining new alternatives, noticing details, creating positive environments for learning, etc. Escape games inherently evoke various emotions and intuitions and also demand participants to utilize multiple senses and make conclusions, asserting their will based on their beliefs about a potential solution.  Escape games provide safe and powerful opportunities for participants to increase self-awareness.

2. The learning in any escape game is not about the information gleaned, since the games are almost always fictional in nature. The real learning is the actual process by which one solves the puzzles. These ideas are not concepts, but practiced abilities that have repeatedly proven themselves in a concrete fashion, to the great satisfaction of the participant.

3. The skills developed in an escape game can - and must - translate since the next escape game will inevitably have different information in a different storyline or theme. Therefore, for a participant to learn or grow in their ability to succeed in an escape game, it is the skill of solving puzzles (learning to learn) that must be developed and built on as opposed to the collection of facts or knowledge.