Embracing ‘gameful learning’ with escape room games in higher education

Escape room games have been increasingly used in higher education to promote interactive and engaging student learning. We sought to identify how escape room games used in three distinct discipline programmes at a large university were perceived by students and educators in terms of intended learning and broader, transferrable skill development. We distributed surveys to students and educators, receiving 708 student responses and eight educator responses. We analysed the quantitative data descriptively and the qualitative data using thematic analysis. The results show that both students and educators perceive rich and multi-faceted learning through escape rooms in medical sciences, biological sciences and education discipline contexts. The results show that escape room games inherently promote similar transferable skills and student motivations regardless of their disciplinary context. When used sparingly, we recommend escape rooms as potentially rich learning spaces in higher education.