Escape Room combined with European Board Game Concepts for self-adjusted Challenge Levels: An educational Eurogame Escape Room in Physics

TL;DR

This paper introduces an educational physics escape room integrated with European board game concepts, enabling self-adjusted challenge levels and enhancing student engagement and learning through flexible, game-like puzzles.

Contribution

It presents a novel combination of escape room design with Eurogame principles, allowing self-paced learning and motivation in physics education.

Findings

Knowledge transfer improved through discipline-specific cards.

Students can self-adjust challenge levels with independent puzzles.

European board game elements increase engagement and motivation.

Abstract

We present an educational escape room in physics (ERP) covering the main disciplines of physics as taught in the education of neighboring sciences, in this case veterinary medicine, extended by a European board game system of victory points (VP). The puzzles in physics are mandatory to master the ERP requiring to be solved in a sequential order. In our study, we show the growth of knowledge by knowledge-transfer cards separated into disciplines of physics as demonstrated by critical exemplary questions of test groups. Tactical secondary puzzles, the so called \textit{Eurogame puzzles} (EPs), are able to be solved in parallel in any arbitrary and independent sequence, allowing a self-adjusted challenge autolevelled by the students by choice. The motivation is improved by a scoring list to solve, at least, a few optional EPs as additional game-like adventure and challenge collecting VP. A second part of the study demonstrates the attraction of the introduced European board game concept as an important tool for gamificiation and open-by-choice EPs not being necessarily related to physics directly. EPs are able to smooth the contrast of playing games and learning, providing an additional bridge to overcome the fear of physics. A strong advantage is the flexibility of the European board concept, choosing from a broad range of optional EPs to fascinate and motivate students taking into account individual preferences improving escape rooms by decision-making skills. The concept is able be applied to every escape room independent of the taught subject or topic.