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Escape rooms are immersive game environments in which a small group of participants are locked in a windowless room. They have a predetermined amount of time to solve various puzzles that unlock the tools and clues needed to find a way out. In recent years, the popularity of escape rooms has grown immensely. In 2014, only approximately 24 permanent escape rooms existed in the United States. Just 5 years later in 2019, that total grew immensely to more than 2,350 (Spira, 2019). The drive behind escape room popularity taps into basic human nature—love for games, desire to win, general curiosity, and feelings of importance as part of a team (Masters of Entertainment, 2019). The team is a crucial element of escape rooms, as puzzles often require different perspectives and varying logics and sometimes even multiple people for physical tasks. Educators from the health care field, where teamwork is so crucial, have noted the emphasis of teamwork in escape rooms and have recently used escape rooms as a teaching modality. Games such as escape rooms require problem solving, critical thinking, and teamwork—perfect skills needed for new nurses (Morrell & Ball, 2020).
Literature Review of Escape Room Modality
The escape room modality has been shown as a valuable teaching tool to increase learner knowledge (Eukel et al., 2017). Moreover, they align with constructivism and adult learning theories that are pertinent to today's generation of nursing students (Morrell & Ball, 2020). These theories claim that learners build their knowledge as they process new life experiences and are actively engaged in their learning. This modality, used in conjunction with simulation-based education, offers an even further unique and dynamic twist to the education. The simulation setting is an ideal environment to facilitate an escape room activity as it contains the fundamental physical elements required to facilitate this activity: control room, one-way mirror, and communication devices. Furthermore, as previous researchers have highlighted, it is also low cost (Eukel et al., 2017; Gómez-Urquiza et al., 2019).
Other health care education researchers have used an escape room teaching modality with simulation and have achieved worthwhile results. Previous researchers administered this modality to nursing students in a maternity clinical course and concluded that the activity promoted collaboration, prioritization, and communication (Edwards et al., 2019)....