Escape Together! – Escape Game Pedagogy as a Promoter of Community in Education 2024–2026

Escape game pedagogy as a promoter of community spirit in education

In the Escape Together! -project, education professionals can learn about, try out, and test various mystery tasks and puzzles, as well as create and develop their own educational escape games. Together to Escape is a project funded by the Finnish National Agency for Education and implemented in collaboration with the University of Eastern Finland, Kajaani University of Applied Sciences, and the University of Applied Sciences for Humanities.

The aim of the Escape Together! -training is to promote the application of collaborative, participatory, and creative methods based on escape game pedagogy in basic and vocational education as well as in upper secondary education. The training provides teachers in basic and vocational education with new ways of teaching using escape game pedagogy. The training courses open up new perspectives on game-based learning and the design of physical and virtual escape room games, and provide the necessary tools for implementing your own pedagogical escape games.

Escape game pedagogy combines playfulness and learning. The project’s training courses provide teachers in basic and vocational education with new tools for implementing escape game pedagogy in their teaching. The training sessions open up new perspectives on game-based learning and the design of physical and virtual escape games, and provide the necessary tools for implementing your own pedagogical escape games. The project’s regional groups are based in Joensuu, Kuopio, and Kajaani, where we develop and implement our own escape game

The Escape Together! -project training package consists of four training sections, of which the game pedagogy webinars and online training are available nationwide online. The applied sections of the training, which introduce the design and implementation of educational escape room games, will be held in regional groups in Kuopio, Joensuu, and Kajaani. With the help of regional groups, teachers can concretely plan and implement their own escape games in their educational institutions.

Results

The Escape Together! project has been an enchanting journey into the world of imagination and creativity. During the project meetings, we designed and implemented concrete educational escape games to be carried out in educational institutions, and we tested, experimented with, and solved mysteries and puzzles that inspire learning in practice.

There has been great interest in escape game pedagogy, and we have had more registrations than we have been able to accept. Those who started the training have been highly committed, and over the past six months we have enjoyed a fireworks display of creativity and ingenuity as well as peer learning from other participants. Regional implementations have developed and implemented their own escape games, which have since been put into active use in educational institutions.