Escape room refers to a teaching technique whereby learners are supposed to uncover the clues to solving puzzles with the aim of achieving a set goal within a given time. As a teacher, embracing the escape room in a classroom will have several benefits.
The use of escape room in a classroom encourages working together of the students. In most cases, every student will want to escape and will openly discuss their escape plans.
Also, the escape room experience provides lessons that are valuable and that were considered as boring traditionally. Once the students are aware that they will have an escape plan to apply what they learnt from a lesson, they tend to be excited and more attentive to the lesson. That makes them pay much attention to the lesson they are being taught.
Additionally, an escape room adds a framework of a game on top of a rather monotonous lesson which then increases the students’ participation and they as well retain much of the learning. In most cases, students will tend to forget some memorized definitions, but once they recall the lesson from the escape room, they can recall the keywords and visual images used to escape. You can then be sure that students will have a good memory of a particular lesson.
Another good thing about using escape rooms in a classroom is that it covers all styles of learning. Visual auditory, kinesthetic learning, reading and writing are some of the learning styles that are utilized in the escape room.
Furthermore, escape rooms encourages thinking outside the box. Normally, the escape room is a gradual learning process whereby simple puzzles are solved first as students move on to more complicated ones. The final puzzles requires the students to use a higher level of thinking in solving them. Students are encouraged to critically reason to come up with solutions to the final puzzles.
Also, an escape room game accommodates different lessons and topics. Learning skills such as language arts, interpretation and spelling are learnt in a single escape room game.
There are higher chances of students applying, analyzing, and synthesizing information learnt, which is contrary to the conventional teaching approach. The approach, therefore, offers them the best chance of familiarizing with the lesson which will be very hard to forget.
In an escape room, it is not possible for a lesson to end before the students have completed their tasks.
Only a little guidance is required to keep a classroom running with the escape room.
Students are brought together by the exciting tools of the escape room.