The most commonly requested fieldtrip over the past 4 years of teaching from my students has been to go and do an escape room. When they ask me to do this, I respond with: “Well, why don’t we make our own here?” Going to an escape room is extremely costly, though it has many incredible benefits for education. After designing multiple different escape rooms for the classroom, and seeing the impact it has on student learning and collaboration, I became curious to see if these are being developed through mobile technologies to make the experience portable and more accessible.
Within recent months, there has been a number of interesting research papers which speak to the prevalence of using Escape Rooms for education or team building. Although a predominant number have explored how the development of escape room games can be beneficial to higher level studies in programming, the function and purpose is only beginning to grow.
Here we have two examples of escape room games that utilize AR to build the experience wherever the player happens to be. At this point in time, they are unique to a single individual completing the activity, but if the same location is used for several players, they could each see the same scene and work together to complete the puzzle in the small space, though each player will have to enter the solution to the puzzles on their own device. It will not be long before a cooperative AR version of escape rooms will be developed which can be utilized for the purpose of education through mobile devices.
ARia’s Legacy is the first mobile escape room game that utilizes the power of AR to send the player into a virtual environment built in their physical space. The player can use a phone or tablet and immerse themselves on an adventure to escape each room and solve the puzzles.
AR Galaxies is beginning to develop AR escape rooms. Though their website is still new and does not share their findings at this point in time, their game demos are truly remarkable and demonstrate the potential in mobile learning technologies for AR escape rooms.
This post was inspired by Matt Wise and his post on May 23, 2020. In his post, he discusses the advantages and disadvantages of AR use for education and in the classroom. I highly encourage you to explore his perspectives if you are interested in engaging in AR for education.
This is a thoughtful reflection on the potential for mobile/virtual escape rooms in education. Your point about the inevitability of the creation of a cooperative AR escape for education on mobile devices is spot on. A quick search shows numerous universities across Canada that have developed physical escape rooms, though mainly for entertainment and social development. I’ve been trying to find examples of college/university co-op programs with strong employer networks that might be experimenting with AR and game-based learning to temporarily enhance/replace the in-person work-integrated-learning experience. While examples outside of VR for lab-based activities are difficult to find, this does seem to be a practical area to watch.
Escape education: A systematic review on escape rooms in education, is an interesting paper that reviews the education and game design aspects of escape rooms (or the lack thereof). The use of mobile devices is present but not a large focus of the paper. The potential direction for education is palpable.
Alice Veldkamp, Liesbeth van de Grint, Marie-Christine P.J. Knippels, Wouter R. van Joolingen,
Escape education: A systematic review on escape rooms in education,
Educational Research Review, Volume 31, November 2020, 100364, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100364.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1747938X20300531
Hi Elixa,
A very good review. Using augmented reality to create the immersive environment with the concept of escape rooms looks very effective and engaging for students. The applicability of the concepts by gamifying the environment yield to interactive and collaborative learning among students. While I was reading your review material, I came across a Metaverse platform using which an application with Augmented Reality and interactive content can be created. It will help educators in enhancing students’ learning experience.
https://studio.gometa.io/landing
Elixa:
I really appreciate the time you have spent to review some of the previous materials that have been posted in this archive. Matt Wise did a great job explaining AR escape rooms in an educational perspective, as well as providing images to make this understanding more tangible. Many peers in previous classes posted numerously about escape rooms and their use of AR, but I could never wrap my head around it. It took until my last class to figure out its meaning, and I think I got it.