Do you like playing with Lego? You would also solve a riddle on a t-shirt? And do you think that there should be much more room for creativity an team work in teaching? Escape rooms are live-action team-based games in which players work together to discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks within a time limit to reach a specific goal. Besides being a very popular pastime for people of all ages, they have recently started to gain momentum in academic circles as educational tools. Research findings have established that educational escape games can create immersion as they combine the strengths of storytelling and gameplay, therefore eliciting high engagement and promoting successful learning.

The workshop will introduce participants to Room2Educ8, a conceptual framework for EER design based on Design Thinking principles, that can be adapted to any subject and escape room type. This framework allows practitioners to develop their creative confidence, which is required for game-based learning to be fully realised, by engaging in hands-on projects that focus on building empathy, promoting a bias toward action, encouraging ideation, and fostering active problem-solving. By the end of the workshop, participants are expected to be able to: demonstrate an understanding of puzzles, themes, and challenges commonly used in escape rooms; critically analyse and identify educational purposes for using ideas based on escape rooms; and use Room2Educ8 to plan, design, facilitate, and evaluate their own educational escape rooms.

The workshop will be held in English and can be attended in person or online.