Educational Escape Rooms

In recent years, escape rooms have emerged as a popular leisure activity worldwide. As defined by Nicholson (2015), an escape room is a “live-action team-based game where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal (usually escaping from the room) in a limited amount of time.” Beyond entertainment, escape rooms have also gained traction in educational contexts due to their potential to promote skills such as teamwork, leadership, creative thinking, and communication . Given these benefits, it is not surprising that many educational institutions have begun incorporating escape rooms into their teaching. Some educators have gone a step further by designing educational escape rooms, which are defined as escape rooms that include part of the course materials within their puzzles in such a way that students are required to master these materials in order to solve the puzzles and succeed in the escape room.

In the UEF Learning Analytics Unit, we believe that escape rooms are engaging and immersive learning environments that serve as rich and authentic sources of learner data for studying collaboration, problem-solving, productive struggle, and other key aspects of learning processes. Therefore, we lead and collaborate on multiple projects that design, implement, and analyze educational escape rooms across diverse contexts. These projects aim not only to enhance student engagement but also to generate meaningful insights into how learners interact, reason, and persist through challenges in complex, time-constrained tasks. Take a look at some of our projects:

CRETIC: Optimizing Clinical Reasoning in Time-Critical Scenarios: A data-driven multimodal approach

Funded by the Research Council of Finland. CRETIC aims to optimize emergency training of healthcare students and trainees. An innovative gamified platform will be developed combining virtual patients and elements of educational escape rooms to simulate clinical emergencies. Data from multiple sources (physiological sensors, questionnaires and digital logs) will be collected to capture the full breadth of the dynamics of the clinical reasoning process. The data will be analyzed using the latest temporal learning analytics and explainable artificial intelligence methods to map the clinical reasoning process and the factors that lead to successful and effective decision-making. The proposal will result in an open scalable platform that will dramatically improve the training of medical emergencies, offer personalized insights into effective decision-making, provide a safe environment for practicing challenging clinical situations, and ultimately decrease medical errors, one of the leading causes of death worldwide.

IGLUE: Implementation of Game-Based Learning Using Escape Rooms

Funded by SEPIE. The IGLUE project aims to empower universities to create and conduct pedagogically sound educational escape rooms and promote the widespread adoption of such innovative learning activities across Europe. The project will have an initial pedagogical design phase in which a methodology for designing effective instructional interventions based on educational escape rooms will be defined. On this basis, a virtual platform for creating, conducting and sharing educational escape rooms will be developed and deployed at each participating institution forming an open and decentralized European network dedicated to the creation, sharing and execution of escape rooms. The developed platform will enable the creation of technology-enhanced educational escape rooms through reusable virtual puzzles and will support all the logistics of conducting an escape room whether face-to-face or remotely. In order to provide teachers, not only with the digital tools, but also with the training they need to create their own educational escape rooms, materials and courses will be created and used to train teachers in the use of the developed methodology and platform.

ENDGAME: Escaping New Disinformation through Gamified cross-border Media literacy Education

Funded by the European Commission. ENDGAME is an innovative European project aimed at cultivating critical thinking and responsible digital citizenship among European youth through educational escape rooms that simulate real-life scenarios of information consumption. We aim to immerse participants in time-sensitive, interactive, and challenging experiences, where they will develop their skills in identifying disinformation, recognizing AI-generated content, and understanding the implications of personal data exposure on social media platforms.

Escapp

All of our projects rely on the Escapp platform, a web software to create and manage educational escape rooms, which also collects and reports learning analytics data and insights for teachers and researchers. Watch the presentation video! Below is a list of all of escapp’s features:

Teacher and student registration
Escape room creation
Shift configuration (multitudinary vs. self-paced)
Puzzle configuration
Hint configuration
Custom escape room instructions
Custom escape room content edition (WYSIWYG)
Gamification elements (leaderboard, progress bar, countdown)
Multimedia upload and insertion
Custom themes
Catalog of reusable puzzles: keypad, safebox etc. (Work in progress9
Team management
Roll call / attendance
Student progress tracking
Automatic hint delivery
Assessment
Real-time and post-activity learning analytics
Real-time team progress synchronization
Client application for the development of external puzzles

Publications

Case studies
- Barra E., López-Pernas S., Gordillo A., Pozo A., Munoz-Arcentales J.A., Conde J. (2024). Empowering Database Learning through Remote Educational Escape Rooms. IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 28.0(1), pp. 18.0-25.0. doi: 10.1109/MIC.2023.3333199. (JCR Q1).
- López-Pernas S., Gordillo A., Barra E., Quemada J. (2019). Analyzing Learning Effectiveness and Students’ Perceptions of an Educational Escape Room in a Programming Course in Higher Education. IEEE Access, vol. 7, art. no. 8936344, pp. 184221-184234. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2960312. (JCR Q1).
- López-Pernas S., Gordillo A., Barra E., Quemada J. (2019). Examining the Use of an Educational Escape Room for Teaching Programming in a Higher Education Setting. IEEE Access, vol. 7, art. no. 8658086, pp. 31723-31737. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2902976. (JCR Q1).
- López-Fernández D., Gordillo A., López-Pernas S., Tovar E. (2024). Are remote educational escape rooms designed during the pandemic useful in a post-pandemic face-to-face setting?. IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 28(1), pp. 34-41. doi: 10.1109/MIC.2023.3336057. (JCR Q1).
- López-Pernas S., Gordillo A., Barra E., Quemada J. (2021). Comparing Face-to-Face and Remote Educational Escape Rooms for Learning Programming. IEEE Access, vol. 9, art. no. 9405675, pp. 59270-59285. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3073601. (JCR Q2).
- Gordillo A., López-Fernández D., López-Pernas S., Quemada J. (2020). Evaluating an Educational Escape Room Conducted Remotely for Teaching Software Engineering. IEEE Access, vol. 8, art. no. 9292916, pp. 225032-225051. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3044380. (JCR Q2).
- Vartiainen H., López-Pernas S., Saqr M., Kahila J., Parkki T., Tedre M., Valtonen T. (2023). Mapping students’ temporal pathways in a computational thinking escape room. Proceedings of the 1st Finnish Learning Analytics and Artificial Intelligence in Education Conference (FLAIEC 2022) (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), vol. 3383, pp. 77-88. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3383/FLAIEC22_paper_9625.pdf.
Learning analytics:
- López-Pernas S., Saqr M., Gordillo A., Barra E. (2022). A learning analytics perspective on educational escape rooms. Interactive Learning Environments. doi: 10.1080/10494820.2022.2041045. (JCR Q1).
- Santamaría-Urbieta A., López-Pernas S. (2024). Hint Strategies in Educational Escape Rooms: A Process Mining Approach. Revista de Educación (405), pp. 13-38. doi: 10.4438/1988-592X-RE-2024-405-626. (JCR Q2).
- López-Pernas S., Gordillo A., Barra E., Saqr M. (2024). Tracking students’ progress in educational escape rooms through a sequence analysis inspired dashboard. Inclusive and equitable quality education for all. EC-TEL 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, art. no. 15160, pp. 119-124. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-72312-4_15.
- López-Pernas S., Gordillo A., Barra E., Saqr M. (2023). Game learning analytics: The case of online educational escape rooms. Proceedings of the 1st Finnish Learning Analytics and Artificial Intelligence in Education Conference (FLAIEC 2022) (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), vol. 3383, pp. 121-122. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3383/FLAIEC22_paper_7043.pdf.
Technology for creating escape rooms:
- López-Pernas S., Gordillo A., Barra E., Quemada J. (2021). Escapp: A web platform for conducting educational escape rooms. IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 38062-38077. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3063711. (JCR Q2).
- Conde, M.Á., García-Esteban, J.A., Román-Gallego, JÁ., López-Pernas, S. (2025). Analysing Student Engagement Through the Definition of Educational Escape Rooms. In: Smith, B.K., Borge, M. (eds) Learning and Collaboration Technologies. HCII 2025. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15808. Springer, Cham. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-93746-0_1.
- López-Pernas S., Gordillo A., Barra E., Quemada J. (2019). Identification, analysis of requirements for a web platform for managing educational escape rooms. Proceedings of the 12th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI 2019), pp. 4874-4883. doi: 10.21125/iceri.2019.1191.
- López-Pernas S., Gordillo A., Barra E. (2021). Technology-Enhanced Educational Escape Rooms: A Road Map. IT Professional, vol. 23(2), art. no. 9391739, pp. 26-32. doi: 10.1109/MITP.2021.3062749. (JCR Q2).

Reviews and meta-analyses
- López-Pernas S. (2024). Educational Escape Rooms Are Effective Learning Activities Across Educational Levels and Contexts: A Meta-analysis. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, vol. 17, pp. 711-724. doi: 10.1109/TLT.2023.3328913. (JCR Q1).