Escape Rooms for Secondary Mathematics Education: Design and Experiments

Escape rooms are an increasingly popular form of live-action entertainment in which teams of players need to solve puzzles to escape or reach a narrative goal within a specified time limit. Current research suggests that this style of activity promotes the effective use of team skills in the classroom, which are desirable in the workplace, and also that students are more engaged in the hands-on learning environment. During this study we created a game designed to teach mathematical concepts related to finding missing side lengths in a right-angled triangle using trigonometry to secondary school students who had limited knowledge in this area. Our experiment tested the success of our escape room’s teaching capabilities through comparing student performance on a test completed immediately after finishing the game. We also evaluated whether students’ perception of the applicability of mathematics and their feelings towards studying it improves from playing. Finally, we intended to confirm the findings of other researchers on engagement; extend that to the effective use of team skills through examining if there is a relationship between completion time and the observed behaviours within each team. Results suggest that the game is successful in teaching and building familiarity with some aspects of the topic and that there is no correlation between effective team skills and completion time. We make suggestions for improvements to the game design that would warrant an additional experiment into the teaching potential of escape rooms.