“Unlike other forms of games where the player controls an avatar [such as Voki or Minecraft], escape rooms place the player directly into the game,” said Scott Nicholson, a professor of game design and development at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. “Because of that, the effects of experiential learning can be more effective, as there are fewer barriers between the player and the experience.”

Nicholson has been researching the evolution of escape rooms since 2014 to see how they might fit into an educational program. He is widely considered the global expert on escape rooms, in part because he’s published the first academic discourse in this emerging field. “Escape rooms create a moment of passion around specific topics that then can be used as the spark to then ignite interest in something for a player to learn more about later,” he said.

Nicholson considers the growth of educational escape rooms a signal that educators are willing to adapt their behavior in order to better communicate with their students. “The concept of meaningful gamification is not to provide external rewards, but rather to help participants find a deeper connection to the underlying topic,” he wrote in a recent white paper.

While the use of escape rooms in education is a nascent idea, the first recreational escape room can be traced back to Japan in 2007. Now, there are 4,785 globally, the majority recreational, spanning 75 countries, according to the Escape Room Directory. They vary in design and style, but the basic premise is the same: People are trapped inside a space for a specific amount of time and need to solve a number of puzzles to get out. Puzzles tend to be theme-related; in a prison room, you might decode graffiti, pick handcuffs, or defuse a bomb. Turning this into a classroom activity creates a number of challenges—teachers have to grapple with constraints imposed by classroom size, facilities, and the Common Core standards.

But Brian Mayer, a gaming and library-technologies specialist at Genesee Valley School Library System in New York, believes the payoff is worth the effort. He started looking into the concept in April 2016, after he received a request for a literature-themed escape room from a teacher in his district. “It's been people requesting it from us. We’re not pushing people to do this,” he said.

Mayer and his colleague, Lisel Toates, started brainstorming. They specialize in using game design to demonstrate practical applications of mathematics, technology, and communication skills, and the computer game Minecraft seemed a natural fit for building a virtual escape room. They decided to combine the digital space with real-life physical props to encourage lateral thinking. Plus, if it was successful, it would be easy to share with his 22 school districts, as most game assets could exist on a thumb drive.