Quest for Learning

Educational Escape rooms (EERs) foster learning engagement, but have been criticized for promoting extrinsic motivation and shallow learning by overemphasizing game elements. To address this, it is essential to better align game mechanics with desired learning outcomes and consider the relationship between EER interaction design and pedagogical theories. This work combines educational and interaction design methods to improve escape rooms as a pedagogical format. We introduce an escape room design approach here named the quest room, adapted for informal learning at museums. Using a Research-through-Design methodology, we present three digiphysical quest rooms developed and implemented at museums. Further, we propose an edu-interaction framework that combines five lenses of analysis: playification, embodied aspects, sociality, game mechanics, and interactive storytelling, to analyse the quest room exemplars. The study offers insights for designing and evaluating future EERs.