Designing an Escape Room Game to Develop Problem Solving and Spatial Reasoning Skills

This paper describes the process of developing, piloting, and evaluating an educational and entertaining "escape room" style game for fifth grade students. The goal of this educational game is to supplement review of coursework and improve problem solving and spatial reasoning skills. The authors targeted problem solving and spatial reasoning skills because even college level students struggle with these skills, and students who have stronger abilities in these areas perform better across a variety of STEM courses. By allowing students the ability to practice and develop problem solving and spatial reasoning skills at an early age, the authors anticipate participating students will improve their confidence in utilizing these skills that are essential in scientific and technical fields [1] as well as increase their likelihood of pursuing a STEM career. Targeted surveys at preand post-game will be used to assess these areas from the participating students as well as their teachers' perspectives. Additionally, student performance on problems requiring employment of these skills will be measured preand postgame. Keywords— K-12 Education; Educational Games; Problem Solving; Spatial Reasoning; Escape Room Introduction, Background, and Motivation Problem solving and spatial reasoning skills are essential to STEM careers [1], yet many students lack the practice needed to develop expertise in these areas. The authors seek to develop a mechanism through which students will be able to practice and enhance problem solving and spatial reasoning skills. The mechanism to accomplish this goal is an escape room, and the target audience is fifth grade students. Escape rooms are a popular type of game and are generally found in two varieties: (1) virtual and (2) real-life. A virtual escape room is a short app or video game where a player attempts to solve a mystery to escape the virtual environment and win the game. Virtual escape rooms generally require the user to locate hidden objects by clicking within the environment and, occasionally, combining these objects to solve a puzzle. In a real-life escape room, a group of players is “locked” in a room and work as a team to find hidden objects that are used to solve puzzles in order to “escape” the room. These real-life experiences are becoming very popular team building exercises in addition to pure entertainment experiences among groups of friends. The popularity of real-life escape rooms has created a number of new experiences, educational and/or fun, throughout the world [2] – [3]. The purpose of this project is to develop a real-life, easily portable escape room game containing customizable content that allows options for re-play. These two features, portability and replayability, are unique amongst typical escape room games. For purposes of educational outreach, the portability of the game is essential, and initial set-up time should be quick (~30 minutes) with re-set for replay also being quick (~15 min). While the initial target group is fifth grade students, once the game has been constructed and tested, expanding on the customizability will ensure widespread outreach usability. For instance, creating content for various ages (e.g., K-12) that may be used in the customizable areas of the game will expand the population that will benefit from the game. Even with future expansion, the target audience for this game is precollege students. Therefore, the educational content in the game will be related to K-12 coursework and incorporate content from multiple subject areas such as history, English, general science, biology, chemistry, and mathematics. Additionally, to add to the customizability of the game, organizers will be able to utilize a wide variety of question types including: mathematical or calculation based, algorithm based, visually based (recognizing information from a picture), 3D spatial based, map interpretation based, logic based, or pattern recognition based. Finally, the game will require students to read content and identify relevant information thereby practicing skills needed for solving word problems.