Let's Jazz: A Case Study on Teaching Music with Educational Escape Rooms

This study presents an educational escape room designed to teach jazz and Afro-American music to lower secondary students, aiming to add evidence on game-based learning in non-scientific subjects, which remain underrepresented in escape room research. The scenario casts players as detectives investigating a murder in a New Orleans jazz club backstage, with puzzles built around instruments, song structure, the pentatonic scale, and the historical roles of work songs and spirituals. The authors also tested a three-stage assessment design to examine whether the debriefing phase consolidates what students learn during play.

The experiment involved one second-year class of 20 students aged 12 to 13 in Switzerland, tested with a teacher-designed eight-question instrument administered before the game, immediately after it, and two weeks after a structured debriefing. Average scores rose from 9.50 percent on the pre-test to 58.35 percent on the first post-test and 73.72 percent on the second post-test, with 66 percent of students reaching the highest performance band after debriefing compared with 25 percent immediately after play. Teacher observations and a six-item survey indicated high enjoyment and engagement, though group performance was uneven, with success linked to the presence of a coordinating leader within teams.

The authors acknowledge important limitations: the study covers a single class, lacks a control group, and relies on a non-standardized test created by the teacher who also delivered the intervention. Nonetheless, the findings suggest that debriefing plays a substantial role in converting the engagement of escape room play into retained subject knowledge, and they point toward future experimental research on motivation, learning outcomes, and student profiles in music education.