The Quest for Learning: Pedagogical and Interaction Design Perspectives on Quest Rooms

The quest room is presented as a museum-adapted alternative to conventional escape rooms, designed to align game mechanics with educational goals rather than emphasizing time pressure and competition. Developed through research through design, the concept is examined across three digiphysical iterations: a 2019 room built around the Ingrid Johansson story, which was tested with roughly thirty participants; a later app-based permanent exhibition; and the Archive Quest at Uppsala Castle Museum in Sweden. Each iteration is analyzed through an edu-interaction framework that considers how physical and digital elements support learning.

Findings from the first iteration indicate that most participants enjoyed the collaborative, untimed format and reported acquiring new knowledge. Physical actions, such as sending Morse code, proved most effective at prompting learning conversations, whereas participants tended to skim textual content rather than engage with it in depth. These observations suggest that embodied interaction may matter more to learning engagement than written information in this setting.

The Archive Quest, built around a fictional retired archivist's unsolved historical riddles, receives the most detailed evaluation. A master's thesis study of invited groups, analyzed through self-determination theory, found that the quests sparked curiosity, supported competence through balanced difficulty, and fostered autonomy and relatedness through collaboration. Observations during the May 2025 inauguration, attended by about 500 visitors, showed sustained engagement through problem-solving and discussion, with visitors connecting quest activities to the museum's historical content. Museum staff later described the room as well functioning and well used.

Overall, the work draws on a body of literature on educational escape rooms, playful learning, and interaction design, including a 2024 systematic review of theoretical foundations in the field. Its evidence base is modest in scale and largely qualitative, with the strongest claims coming from a single museum deployment, yet it offers a coherent argument that quest-based design can foster curiosity, collaboration, and historical understanding within cultural heritage settings.