Adaptability and Procedural Content Generation for Educational Escape Rooms

This literature review examines how Educational Escape Rooms (EERs) can improve teaching, learning, and assessment, with a particular focus on designing EERs that are accessible and adaptable to all students, including visually impaired learners. Drawing on research published over roughly the last five years, the work positions EERs as an engaging form of playful, problem-based learning that builds non-cognitive skills such as teamwork, communication, and problem-solving. It proposes that effective EER development rests on a structured design framework, combining narrative and level design, and that adaptability to individual student needs should be built in from the start.

The review synthesizes several existing design frameworks, including escapED, the Synder Escape Room Framework, and the EduER framework, which draws on the first two. It also covers narrative approaches (emergent versus fixed storylines), level design principles that balance rewards and difficulty, and procedural content generation (PCG) as a way to produce personalized game content. Accessibility concerns receive particular attention, including photosensitivity, epilepsy triggers, color contrast, and colour blindness, with recommendations to involve target users in the design process and to use colour-selection tools.

The authors report evidence that students show progress in performance and gain more from adaptable EERs than from traditional learning methods, though these conclusions rest on a qualitative synthesis of the literature rather than a new controlled study. They identify notable gaps: assessment of EER learning outcomes remains underdeveloped, and there is no single, widely accepted EER framework. They conclude that learning analytics and further research on accessibility and PCG-driven adaptability are needed to strengthen the field.