The escape rooms and breakouts are immersive games in which the participants are locked in a room and must solve a series of puzzles to escape. In virtuality, these games have also aroused interest in the educational field as a learning tool to transform students from passive spectators to active participants. Immersive learning allows students to learn about a topic while practicing teamwork and communication. This chapter aims to explain how these tools work and describe the implementation process using digital educational resources available on the web. Some examples developed by the authors are mentioned, and the evaluation results concerning the students' motivation, satisfaction, and participation in a virtual environment are presented.
TopIntroduction
Nowadays, the gamification in the educational context is generating a greater impact on educational actors due to the motivation and diversity of environments that are generated at the time of transferring the games mechanics to school environment, which can be applied in an individual or group way.
A micro gamification model is the Escape Rooms and the Breakouts, both have similarities in learning-teaching development. The Escape Room is defined as an escape room where one or a group of students solve enigmas in a certain time to be able to leave (Garcia, 2019). On the other hand, a Breakout is an immersive game derived from Escape Rooms, with the difference that in a breakout you don't have to leave a room where a group is locked up; here the objective is to open a box closed with different types of padlocks. To get the codes that open them it is necessary to solve problems, questionnaires and riddles. A short narrative transforms the participants into secret agents, scientists, adventurers, or any character we imagine Negre (2017).
Matínez and Chivite (2020) affirm: “under the Castilian name of Escape Games, two terms are associated in English: Escape Room and Breakout. Both terms refer to a set of gamification tools where a group of students, normally grouped into teams, compete to solve a series of challenges in order to get out of a specific space in a given time ”(p.38). The use of this type of playful strategies in the classroom is can be adapted to any curricular content and allows students to develop various skills, which are mentioned below:
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collaboration and teamwork,
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critical thinking development and problem-solving skills,
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improvement of communicative competence,
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strengthening continuous and constant work
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deductive thinking construction,
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under pressure work,
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learning protagonist and
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increase motivation
For Palomo (2019), these educational micro gamification tools allow students’ participation motivation and improvement when acquiring their knowledge. Where the student becomes the protagonist of their own learning. Through participation, collective thinking is prioritized in order to meet the challenges posed. Each of the participants must demonstrate and share their knowledge or skills to solve the riddles and thus generate cooperative learning.
Escape Rooms and Breakouts can be applied to different academic areas such as: Mathematics, Physical Education, Chemistry, English, among others. As examples, experiences carried out in different subjects are cited, such as: Analysis of an Educational Escape Room in Primary Education Mathematics Class carried out by (García, Solano and Sánchez, 2020). The designing and participating experience in an educational Escape Room in Physical Education and Technology carried out by (López and Ortega, 2018). Study carried out for chemistry subject on: Escape room in ESO 3rd year for a meaningful chemistry learning (Reñe, 2020) and the Design of an Educational Escape Room as a gamified and motivating tool for learning English in Primary by (O'Brien and Yebra, 2019).