Escape Rooms as a Collaborative Problem-Solving Environment

Introduction

When using problem-solving as an approach to teaching, it is important to examine what kinds of authentic experiences the students have through problem-solving (Nunokawa, 2005). The importance of authenticity in the problem-solving process has been emphasized as a means to direct students’ attention to desirable behaviors and scaffold their solving activities (Forman & Steem, 2000; Verschaffel & De Corte, 1997). Escape rooms can be seen as innovative means to provide authentic experiences that facilitate solvers to exhibit certain problem-solving and metacognitive behavior in a collaborative setting. Escape rooms games constitute a very recent and popular way of entertainment for young people that integrates technology. They are live-action single-player or team-based games where players must escape from a place under time constraints by discovering clues and solving puzzles (Nicholson, 2015). Some researchers suggest to use them as a form of an educational environment to teach mathematics or problem-solving (Pan, Lo, & Neustaedter, 2017). Indeed, escaping from a game room requires certain problem-solving skills (Muir, Beswick & Williamson, 2005) such as ‘interpreting information, planning and working methodically, checking results, and trying alternative strategies’ (p. 229) in the context of collaboration and communication between the participants.

In this landscape, the aim of this paper is to examine in what ways escape rooms can facilitate aspects of social metacognitive behavior in groups of high school students.