Educational escape games for mixed reality

Abstract

Escape Games are new real-world entertainment formats where two to six people collaboratively solve riddles to escape a locked room in a certain fictional setting, e.g. a space station. Educational researchers have adopted the concept for teaching science subjects, e.g. in K12 teaching. However, setting up such rooms is costly because of the physical objects which are required for the riddles. In this paper, we introduce a gamified Mixed Reality environment, which was adopted to create educational Escape Rooms in an easy and fast way. We created two games for different subjects to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by an evaluation at a high school. The games and the platform are open source software and open content, to facilitate the creation and the use of educational Escape Games on a broader base.