Abstract:

Present-day teaching and learning should involve the tackling of the so-called 21st century skills, namely communication, critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, collaboration and entrepreneurism.

An holistic and experiential approach, in which students are not spectators, should allow them to develop playful and hands-on activities, reflect upon what they are learning, relate to past experiences and apply it to their daily lives (Chickering & Ehrman, 1996). In fact, we believe that all this can be achieved by implementing the so-called didactics of gamification, i.e., by incorporating “game design elements in non-game contexts” like education (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled & Nacke, 2011, p. 9), students can be motivated and challenged in order to develop through the stimulation of their senses, and to experience the activity as something meaningful, alive and active. When conceiving a gamified activity, one should have into account Chou’s (2016) Octalysis Framework, which caters for a rigorous and scientific approach towards the implementation of an efficient gamified approach.

The same shall occur with the “Escape Room” methodology, which also depends on a state of continuous flow, promoting an intrinsic motivation, by incorporating the Core Drives of the “Octalysis Model” (Cruz, 2019). As escape rooms consist of live-action team-based games where people interact and explore the environment in order to discover clues, objects and puzzles that allow him to overcome problems, challenges and, ultimately, unravel the mystery of the narrative (Nicholson, 2015), we believe that these may favour and foster the development of 21st century skills in educational contexts.

Bearing all this in mind, the purpose of this paper is, on the one hand, to reflect on the use of escape rooms as a gamified didactic approach in the process of teaching and learning, by focusing on the state of art and framework on the topic. On the other hand, it is our aim to conduct a study based on the methodological principles of systematic literature review, following the guidelines of Magee (1998), Torgerson (2003) and Hannes & Lockwoord (2012), namely:
a) search strategy;
b) selection;
c) quality assessment;
d) data extraction;
e) data synthesis.

This research will be based on the qualitative paradigm, using an interpretive-exploratory methodology, in which we propose to understand and interpret the reality under the scope of “Escape Rooms in Education” (Coutinho, 2014). It is our intention to identify and analyze:
i) studies carried out on the creation and implementation of escape rooms within formal educational contexts;
ii) gamified techniques and elements which have been used; and
iii) results obtained which focus on the development of 21st century skills.

We will be using a theoretical corpus composed of empirical texts, published between 2015 and 2020, which resulted from Boolean research in databases (Scopus and Web of Science databases) available online, using truncation and search strings, such as: “escape room” OR “escape game” AND “education” OR “school” OR “university” OR “higher education institution”.

Results show that the "Escape Room" methodology:
a) promotes the development of essential skills for the 21st Century, namely collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving;
b) works better in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contexts;
c) requires that teachers undertake professional development courses on the topic.

Keywords:

Gamification, escape rooms in education, 21st century learning, octalysis model.