Escape rooms and education: what can a class practise together?

An escape room can be a way of learning, but only when the teacher picks a scenario for a specific goal and talks it through with the class afterwards. What gets practised most reliably is teamwork, passing on information and connecting facts logically. Some formats add Krakow’s history and art, finding your way around the city, or practice in English. A visit on its own doesn’t automatically cover anything on the curriculum.

An escape room gives students the chance to tackle a task together instead of just listening to an explanation. They have to read the instructions, compare information, suggest a solution and check whether it works. An entertainment scenario is a good starting point, but an educational goal needs preparation beforehand.

From puzzle to skill

Tasks can draw on counting, geography, analysing clues or working with your hands. Which skill gets practised depends on the specific puzzle. If you want to practise a particular skill, ask the organiser whether the scenario actually requires it.

For example, reading a table and comparing two values is a different task from quick mental arithmetic. Remembering the name of a mountain isn’t the same as finding your way on a map. The more precisely you define the goal, the easier it is to judge whether the trip will fit it.

In a team game you can also watch how the teamwork itself unfolds: whether students share what they discover, listen to each other’s ideas and can get back to the task after a mistake. These observations shouldn’t be used to label students as “leaders” or “weak players”.

Which format for which goal?

Operators in Krakow describe several formats that differ in what they let you practise:

• Art history and the history of Krakow: at Gamescape, the Chimera Protocol room uses real paintings by Krakow’s master painters in its puzzles. Before your visit, ask which works are involved so you can prepare a short introduction in class.
• Logical thinking in a fairy-tale world: Enchanted Amulets is a fantasy-themed room that the operator recommends for classes who love stories from books, films and games.
• Finding your way and the city’s history: city games lead teams around with an iPad, GPS and augmented reality elements. EscapeCity runs them for schools in the Old Town, Kazimierz and Nowa Huta, and Gamescape describes a school city game lasting about two hours.
• English: both operators let you play a scenario in English. For a class learning the language, it’s a chance to use it in action, not just in a textbook exercise.

Gamescape welcomes children from the age of 8 and, if needed, adjusts the difficulty to the players’ age. You’ll find details and conditions for groups in Gamescape’s school offer and EscapeCity’s offer for schools.

A simple way to prepare the class

Before the visit, choose one goal with your students and link it to the format. If you’re playing in the room with paintings, announce that after the game each team will talk about one work that appeared in the puzzles. In a city game, ask the team to predict the direction themselves before checking the map on the tablet. In a scenario played in English, agree that the team also talks to each other in English, even in simple sentences.

If the goal is passing on information, you can prepare a short exercise in class. Each person in the group gets one of three fragments of a message, and only all of them together show the order of steps. What counts is passing on the whole message, not guessing the code quickly. Afterwards, ask which fragment got left out and why.

After the game, come back to that one goal. Did anyone remember the title of a painting or the name of a place? When did predicting the direction work, and when didn’t it? Which words came in handiest? You can also replay one moment of sharing information: what someone said, how the other person understood it, and whether anyone asked a follow-up question. Instead of asking a student what they’re bad at, ask which kind of task they’d like to try again.

This is an exercise for the teacher to consider, not a description of an experiment that has been carried out. Its value lies in linking the event with reflection, without judging students by how quickly they finished the room.

The city map can be a task too

An outdoor game lets you work with direction, the position of points and planning a route. But having GPS doesn’t mean the children are practising orientation. If one person looks at the screen and everyone else simply follows, the potential is wasted.

You can suggest that a different person reads the route each time and that the team briefly predicts the next direction before checking the device. Road safety rules still apply. Crossing the street always comes before discussing the answer.

Match the story to the group

Pirates, magic and a criminal investigation are different themes, not successive levels of school learning. Check the age limits, the nature of the storyline, the language and the conditions for accompanying adults in Gamescape’s current offer. A crime-themed room intended for older players won’t replace a family adventure just because both have puzzles.

When planning a trip, first decide what the students should experience and how you’ll come back to it afterwards. Remember that “it was interesting” is an opinion about the experience, not proof of learning. A review of research on escape rooms in education (Veldkamp et al., 2020) points out that in recreational escape rooms, what players believe they learned doesn’t match what they actually learned. The real test is whether they can explain or do something after the game. That’s when having fun together can become a meaningful part of your work with the class.