Enhancing Collaborative Learning through Virtual Escape Rooms: Impact on Participants’ Perceptions

Digital revolution has transformed education, allowing students to interact, communicate, and collaborate beyond traditional classroom settings. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) provides opportunities for teamwork and knowledge sharing regardless of geographic location. Recently, Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a promising tool to address these challenges, offering immersive, three-dimensional environments that enhance collaborative learning experiences. Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) extend VR’s potential by enabling users to interact and work together in shared virtual spaces. Moreover, virtual escape rooms have gained traction as an innovative approach to game-based learning, combining the benefits of collaboration, problem-solving, and engagement to create an immersive and interactive educational experience. In view of the above, this paper explores the innovative use of virtual reality (VR) and educational digital escape room games as tools to promote collaborative learning in synchronous distance education and lifelong learning. By designing a cooperative game-based learning environment, the study seeks to leverage the problem-solving and teamwork skills inherent in such games to enhance the learning experience. The impact of these technologies on participants’ perceptions was assessed comparing the information emerged from two surveys conducted before and after the intervention. The findings show that the incorporation of virtual escape room into collaborative learning environments effects positively participants’ perceptions.