ESCAPE the Boring Lecture: Tips and Tricks on Building Puzzles for Medical Education Escape Rooms

Abstract

Escape rooms in medical education are a novel, game-based learning approach for teaching medical topics. In these escape rooms, learners complete a sequential series of medical-themed puzzles leading them to “escape” a specific story. Designing puzzles can be anxiety-provoking and may be the gatekeeper for educators in medicine to create their own escape rooms. Though there have been publications on the importance and methods of building a healthcare-themed-escape room, there is a gap in the literature on designing puzzles to teach specific learning objectives successfully. In this Scholarly Perspective, the authors share puzzle ideas and support tools and use Bloom's taxonomy as the framework to teach educators how to design challenging and engaging escape room puzzles.