Field Robotics Education Through Educational Escape Rooms—A Design Study

One challenge faced by many educators is strongly engaging students to improve their intrinsic motivation in learning. This paper describes the design and beta testing of two educational escape rooms targeted towards teaching students concepts related to field robotics—an area in which educational escape rooms have yet to be used. These table-top activities are designed to strongly engage students with robotics-centric puzzles, a fun narrative, and collaborative problem-solving, with validation provided by an electronic decoder box. The sets of puzzles were beta-tested by teams of academics with a robotics background and by undergraduate students. The results indicate that participants had a high level of enjoyment and intrinsic motivation to partake in the activities, although the difficulty and in-game dynamics of some of the tasks will need to be modified for widespread deployment in the classroom.