# Educational Escape Rooms as an Active Learning Tool for Teaching Telecommunications Engineering
###### Abstract  
Traditional education, particularly at a university level is not necessarily very engaging. Educational escape rooms are a recent game based learning approach which combines team based problem solving with a story-line and cryptic clues. In this paper, we apply the concept of educational escape rooms to the telecommunications engineering classroom by creating a series of two separate scenarios, each containing three puzzles. Our evaluation is based on survey results from telecommunication experts which suggest that this will be an engaging and challenging tool for teaching telecommunications engineering. Although educational escape rooms are rapidly being deployed in education, these are the first educational escape rooms that specifically addresses the field of telecommunications engineering.  
telecommunications education; active learning; educational escape rooms; modulation 1  
Rob  
zombies, finding a formula) and complete their mock mission by solving a series of puzzles within a prescribed time interval (typically 1 h) [17]. Since originating in Japan around 2007 escape rooms have spread rapidly around the world [18]. Escape room activities broadly appeal to males and females equally and have been used for corporate team bonding, date nights for couples and as a fun activity among friends [18].  
Although they are referred to as an 'escape room', in reality a traditional escape room often contains more the one room. More recently the escape room game experience has been adapted into board-games and computer based activities (e.g., EXiT, Unlock!). This adaptation allows for the scalability required for use in larger educational environments [17].  
Educational escape rooms are examples of Games for Learning, where concepts to be learnt or revised are embedded within escape room puzzles. Currently educational escape rooms have been run in physically setup rooms [19], as online simulations [20], as a tabletop 'lockbox' experience [21] or using an electronic decoder/validation device [22; 23].  
Although educational escape rooms are a recent concept, they are rapidly growing in scope. Recent examples of educational escape room activities have been described for pharmacy, computer science, engineering, nursing and chemistry [24; 25; 26; 27; 28]. Studies have reported that learners typically report high levels of enjoyment, teamwork and engagement within the educational escape room activities [29; 30].  
In this paper, we extend the escape room concept to create the first two educational escape rooms targeted towards teaching telecommunications engineering. Telecommunications engineering is a board discipline which comprises of computer networking, digital signal processing and fundamental concepts of modulation, signal propagation and fundamental physics [31]. The escape room activities described in this paper are broadly designed to apply the following telecommunications concepts: modulation, attenuation, data integrity, error correction and data encoding.  
Our research question focusses on evaluating escape rooms and specifically types of puzzles which would form an engaging learning experience for the telecommunications engineering classroom. We evalute these collections of puzzles using feedback from experts both from industry and academia.  
This paper is structured into four sections. In Section 2, we discuss our game based learning methodology, including how the escape room games are played and also the actual puzzles used within the game. In Section 3, we present our escape room testing results and analysis with experts comprising of academics and professional engineers. Finally, our concluding remarks and future work are discussed in Section 4.