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Escape rooms provide children with a gaming experience like no other activity.
They present them with an immersive, fun adventure that also incorporates educational qualities. Escape rooms prove to be highly beneficial in enhancing several soft and future career skills that are otherwise not teachable through textbook learning methods.
In a classroom, when you put kids of different intellectual capabilities into a rigid learning environment, most of them tend to get distracted. Theory-based teaching, though important, often fails to retain the attention of children because it tends to be tedious.
This is where escape rooms offer an innovative solution. In escape rooms as well as online escape rooms, kids are transported directly into a tangible and immersive environment that encourages kids to interact with the technologies, texts, and codes physically and mentally. This facilitates hands-on learning that is more effective for kids of all capabilities.
Apart from education, escape rooms also help bring out the natural talents and nurture the intrinsic qualities of children.
In this article, we will look at how escape rooms influence kids in a positive way to inspire innovation and creativity.
Escape rooms & innovation skills
Only a mind that is capable of keen observation and absorption of information from its surroundings can be innovative in the way it approaches the world. To be innovative, kids first need to learn how to study their surroundings thoroughly and identify patterns to see beyond the surface level.
Escape rooms allow them to practice this mental skill. In an escape room, you need to be very cautious of everything around you since anything, and everything inside the room can contain a clue needed for the final escape. So, these experiences are a great way to condition young minds to create a tendency in them to inspect everything closely.
Another important aspect of innovation is memory retention. If you don’t remember what you observe in your surroundings, you will not be able to correlate and identify hidden patterns to crack the given codes of existence. In an escape room, you might not always find an immediate use for a code you have decoded. But you need to keep it in mind and move forward because that code will surely be useful at some other point of the gameplay. You also need to take mental notes of the room layout and the objects in there.
A seemingly unassuming piece of the prop can later be revealed as a crucial hint, and at that point, you should know exactly where to look for it. So, by virtue of its nature, an escape room game trains visual memory effectively.
Escape rooms & creativity skills
You cannot get through an escape room without pushing yourself to think outside of the box. Escape rooms come with no manual and no set rules. Yes, you get a briefing before the mission and some general instructions, but once you are inside the room, it is just you and the creative thinking skills that will get you through the challenge. So, naturally, escape rooms are a great way to create an environment where kids can explore their own critical thinking abilities to come up with alternative solutions.
Though escape rooms are group activities, they also call for individualistic problem-solving approaches. In fact, one of the most common escape room hacks is that you will discover how to harness each players’ skill at the right moment. Since an escape game encapsulates puzzles and riddles of every possible kind, there is no limit to what obstacle can come your way. You might need someone’s mathematical expertise to solve a numerical puzzle, while someone good with sports trivia might unlock another door for your team.
By encouraging each individual’s personal strength an equal chance to shine, escape rooms create a safe space for kids to explore their own thought process and express it without any fear of judgment.
Plus, escape rooms themselves are a work of art – from the set design to the soundscape and lighting – everything that goes into making an escape room a successful simulation work collectively to inspire imagination in kids like nothing else. They get to live inside a fantastical dimension and actively engage with their imaginative side, way more intensely than they can while watching a show or playing a video game in their gaming bed.
Final Thoughts
Even though these theories might come across as too good to be true, they are, in fact, tested and proven. The growth of online activities and educational escape rooms and their use in actual classrooms stands proof of this claim.
A study of escape rooms across the globe revealed that around 8% of them were focused on an educational purpose. In comparison, a total of 22% of them included educational elements to foster learning in a playful manner.
The key here is to remember that kids need to constantly encounter these escape room environments to actually learn and assimilate the lessons in their behavioural patterns. The results will show only with considerable repetition.
Author Bio: Charlotte Lin is a content creator at escaperoom.com. She’s a passionate young woman, mother to an amazing nine-year-old, and an avid reader. Over the years, writing has helped her explore and understand the world as well as her own self. She loves to travel, meet new people, and spend quality time with her daughter. You can find her on LinkedIn.
