Room Escape: Gamification as a Novel Educational Outreach Tool

Chia-huei Tseng
Tohoku University
Sendai, Japan

Room Escape (RE) involves live-action team-based games that have become popular in Asia since 2010. It requires players, usually in a team, to collaborate and communicate in order to discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks to reach a specific goal (usually escaping from the room) in a limited amount of time. RE can be used as a novel tool for public outreach activities, as well as an integral part of the higher education curriculum, as can be seen in the following three examples. In the first one, which took place in Hong Kong, Cognitive Sciences were introduced to the local community in a RE game called ‘Mind Cryp’ over a period of two weeks in 2014. The second targeted high school students in Taiwan in order to introduce Psychology for their choice of a university subject and career. The last example occurred in an international academic conference on Vision Sciences, in which cutting-edge science discoveries were designed as games for the general public to learn about Vision and Material Sciences. In each of these three cases, students were engaged and given opportunities to convert from being passive learners to active teachers. The data showed that RE is novel and effective for both higher education and educational outreach.