Design of an Educational Escape Room by Future Teachers

This study examines how first-year pre-service mathematics and informatics teachers design educational escape rooms using the online tool Room Escape Maker, with the aim of understanding whether student-led design can build problem-solving and collaborative skills and prepare future teachers to use such games in their own classrooms. The work involved 24 students organized into small groups, who created online escape rooms and were evaluated through observation, questionnaires, evaluation cards, and examination of the resulting websites. The research is situated within a single university course, and its scope is therefore limited to one cohort in one educational setting.

The findings are largely positive. Most participants, 93.3 percent, reported enjoying the design activity, valued the creative freedom it offered, and described good collaboration within their groups. Students rated the process highly for fostering creativity and teamwork and saw escape rooms as motivating vehicles for developing logical thinking, critical thinking, and cooperation. Their assessments of peers' rooms favored varied, challenging puzzles that integrated mathematical or computer science content meaningfully. The most consistent difficulty was aligning the rooms with educational goals, which participants found the most demanding part of the task.

The tool itself received mixed reviews. Students found its intuitiveness uneven, and they were frustrated by features restricted to paid accounts and by the inability to edit rooms once published. These limitations point to practical considerations for educators choosing platforms for similar activities. Overall, the study concludes that student-led escape room design is an engaging approach for building future teachers' problem-solving and collaborative competencies, and that participants expressed willingness to incorporate such rooms into their future teaching, though the small, single-course sample constrains broader generalization.