Maestro Martino: Designing a Historic Escape Room With Primary School Children

This paper presents a case study of a Grade 3 primary school class in the Valle di Blenio, Switzerland, that collaboratively designed and built an educational escape room themed on Maestro Martino, a fifteenth-century Renaissance cook born in the region. The project was framed as project-based learning and was tied to a regional cultural celebration marking the 500th anniversary of Martino's birth. The author, an expert escape room designer, supported the process as a reflective participant observer, while the teacher and a local non-profit association handled coordination and final construction. The author positions the work as an example of open-school game design, a context rarely documented in primary education, where most published escape room work involves teachers designing games for students to play.

The project unfolded over a full school year in five phases: requirements analysis, learning content, learning to design, design for learning, and development. Pupils first produced a comic book about Martino's life, then reverse-engineered an existing educational escape room to learn its structure, using the "star model" as the design framework. They then worked in groups to create puzzles, narratives, and hints, with physical padlocks and lock boxes acting as design constraints that determined solution code formats. Puzzles were tested in three tiers, including with pupils from other classes. The association refined the materials into a professionally produced final version installed in a 500-year-old former prison in the local history museum.

According to the author, the installed escape room drew 125 teams, roughly 650 players, over six months, including 30 school classes, and attracted tourists and families largely through word of mouth. Pupils reportedly gained understanding of collaboration, game design as a discipline, and curriculum-linked historical knowledge, though the author notes that no structured quantitative data was collected and that the single-case design limits generalization. The paper argues that escape room design can be a feasible, motivating project for young children, that it can connect schools with local cultural partners, and that educational escape rooms serve broader roles beyond game-based learning.