Presentation
Best Practices when Designing Escape Rooms for Educational and Team Interventions
DescriptionEscape rooms have been increasingly used in educational and research settings
to enhance learning and study emergent states in medical teams (Cohen et al.,
2021; Guckian et al., 2020; Divecha et al., 2025). Emerging meta-analytic
evidence demonstrates escape rooms are an effective method to elicit
improvement in learning objectives and can outperform traditional teaching
methods (Kakos et al., 2025; Yang et al., 2025). By providing an engaging, low-
stakes environment that is free from real-world consequences such as patient
harm, escape rooms create spaces where teams can safely learn, practice, and
be evaluated (Willis et al., 2023). They can accommodate diverse team sizes and
compositions while offering structured, time-limited opportunities for both skill
development and performance assessment. Despite their growing popularity,
designing effective escape rooms for medical audiences presents significant
challenges (Lim, 2024). Translating cognitive or behavioral learning objectives
into solvable puzzles and ensuring consistency in execution and measurement
require intentional design choices. This presentation will highlight common pitfalls
encountered in escape room development and share strategies to optimize
design, implementation, and evaluation. Topics will span: 1) development –
techniques for translating learning objectives into meaningful puzzles and lock
mechanisms; 2) execution – approaches for maintaining consistency across
sessions, including standardized hinting and reset procedures to enhance data
comparability; and 3) measurement – strategies for participant tracking as well as
examples of proximal and distal metrics for assessing performance. Attendees
will leave with practical guidance and actionable tools to design escape rooms
that are intuitive, engaging, reproducible, and effective for both education and
research.
to enhance learning and study emergent states in medical teams (Cohen et al.,
2021; Guckian et al., 2020; Divecha et al., 2025). Emerging meta-analytic
evidence demonstrates escape rooms are an effective method to elicit
improvement in learning objectives and can outperform traditional teaching
methods (Kakos et al., 2025; Yang et al., 2025). By providing an engaging, low-
stakes environment that is free from real-world consequences such as patient
harm, escape rooms create spaces where teams can safely learn, practice, and
be evaluated (Willis et al., 2023). They can accommodate diverse team sizes and
compositions while offering structured, time-limited opportunities for both skill
development and performance assessment. Despite their growing popularity,
designing effective escape rooms for medical audiences presents significant
challenges (Lim, 2024). Translating cognitive or behavioral learning objectives
into solvable puzzles and ensuring consistency in execution and measurement
require intentional design choices. This presentation will highlight common pitfalls
encountered in escape room development and share strategies to optimize
design, implementation, and evaluation. Topics will span: 1) development –
techniques for translating learning objectives into meaningful puzzles and lock
mechanisms; 2) execution – approaches for maintaining consistency across
sessions, including standardized hinting and reset procedures to enhance data
comparability; and 3) measurement – strategies for participant tracking as well as
examples of proximal and distal metrics for assessing performance. Attendees
will leave with practical guidance and actionable tools to design escape rooms
that are intuitive, engaging, reproducible, and effective for both education and
research.
Authors
Event Type
Oral Presentations
TimeTuesday, March 242:37pm - 3:00pm EDT
LocationMorgan
Simulation and Education