Four years of chemical escape rooms in high schools: Educational, mobile, and fun!

Escape rooms are games in which the participants must solve puzzles to successfully escape the room within a certain time frame. We wanted to tap this buzz to improve students` attitudes towards studying Chemistry. Five years ago, we designed and built the first mobile escape room suitable for the educational system. Appropriate changes were done to the escape room concept which include mobility, accommodation of entire classes, affordable materials and alignment with the curriculum.

We have developed three mobile Chemical Escape Rooms (ChEsRms) that can be loaned to chemistry teachers who implement them in their own school lab. More than 170 classes (2660 students) have experienced the ChEsRm during the last two years. In honor of the "International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements (PTOE)", we designed a PTOE ChEsRm. This ChEsRm is a DIY (do it yourself) room, prepared and adapted at school. Therefore, the number of teachers who can use the PTOE ChEsRm is not limited so many students and the general public may be able to experience it.

An evaluation questionnaire was developed based on students` statements of their experience of the escape room (bottom-up); the results indicate that the students were highly engaged and motivated during the activity, and there was an appreciation for teachers` efforts to run the escape room, and effective teamwork. In this presentation we will share our experience in designing and operating the escape rooms and present the influence of the ChEsRms on students attitudes towards learning chemistry.

Peleg, R. Yayon, M. Katchevich, D. Moria-Shipony, M. & Blonder, R., (2019), A lab-based chemical escape room: Educational, mobile, and fun! Journal of Chemical Education, 96 (5), 955-960.

Yayon, M., Rap, S., Adler, V., Haimovich, I., Levy, H., & Blonder, R., DIY: Do-It-Yourself: Creating and Implementing a Periodic Table of Elements Chemical Escape Room. Journal of Chemical Education. (in press).