Educational Escape Rooms as an Active Learning Tool for Teaching Telecommunications Engineering

Abstract

Traditional education, particularly at a university level is not necessarily very engaging. Educational escape rooms are a recent game based learning approach which combines team based problem solving with a story-line and cryptic clues. In this paper, we apply the concept of educational escape rooms to the telecommunications engineering classroom by creating a series of two separate scenarios, each containing three puzzles. Our evaluation is based on survey results from telecommunication experts which suggest that this will be an engaging and challenging tool for teaching telecommunications engineering. Although educational escape rooms are rapidly being deployed in education, these are the first educational escape rooms that specifically addresses the field of telecommunications engineering.