Escape rooms in Youth Standard and Special Education
Escape rooms also known as escape games are cool, adventurous and challenging games where a team of players cooperatively by discovering clues, solving puzzles, and accomplishing tasks, try to reach their target, which is “the escape, “gamification” has been a very successful development in education. For this reason, currently, more and more educational activities include this type of game in standard or special education for all ages. And that’s because escape rooms can teach valuable life skills that are highly applicable to an
Escape rooms encourage all these traits which are valuable for the community- life of human beings like teamwork, critical thinking, attention, problem-solving, time management, collaboration, focus under pressure, and respect of others’ characteristics and way of thinking. Compared to the traditional lecture, an escape room’s “active learning” approach can spark the interest of the classroom and by extent, it can provide further engagement beyond the escape game.
Furthermore, they can be really effective as they can be adapted to any subject and to any target group. For example, people with learning disabilities they love more action than theory. An escape game is a great way to harness their enthusiasm and at the same time, augment the learning outcomes and enhance their skills. Special education is the science that adapts the teaching procedure and content to the needs and peculiarity of each student problem-solving and the same idea behind the creation of learning escape rooms. The plot, the activities, the difficulty, and the target can be adapted to the needs of the course, the student and the goal of the educator.
As a result, all students can feel an indivisible part of the game and at the same time they advance interpersonal and communication skills as well as thinking and observation ability and sense of space.
In the context of escape rooms, currently, in iED, we implement an Erasmus+ project which is called “ER-SE: Escape Rooms for Social Entrepreneurship; re-defining the entrepreneurial ramifications of gamification in youth-oriented activities”.
The projects main objectives are among others to:
- Involve youth with learning disabilities in social entrepreneurship
- Provide an innovative ICT–based model, with theoretical and practical methods that will motivate the young professionals in NGOs to commit in active learning
- Support the development of the EU as a knowledge-based society.
- Educate the next generation of entrepreneurs who are concerned with the sociological ramifications of entrepreneurship