Escape rooms built on creative brainteasers and logic puzzles first became popular mainly among teams of adults and young adults looking for a challenge. As demand grew, themed rooms appeared one after another, built around a popular literary or film world (Star Wars, Harry Potter, CSI) or a historical era or figure (Jack the Ripper, the Second World War). These brought the escape room experience to lovers of the theme in question.
As the interested audience expanded rapidly, families looking for entertainment and relaxation came into the picture — and so, of course, did children. In this article we review what benefits an early escape room experience can bring to a child’s development, based on experience and on teachers’ opinions.
The “searching” tasks build on children’s curiosity and desire to explore. Useful crumbs of information and objects that move the game forward can be found by examining the room’s furnishings. Discovering one of these letters or keys gives a child a sense of achievement: they feel they too are part of solving the puzzle, which draws them in and makes the game enjoyable for them.
In the rooms players encounter the most varied and far from everyday padlocks and locks (key, letter, number, dial and directional padlocks). The varied movements needed to open them contribute to a child’s fine motor development and improve manual dexterity and hand–eye coordination.
The puzzles, hints and processes themselves — the ones that yield the code to a padlock or point towards a partial solution — can also be enormously varied. Artfully worded, enigmatic rhymes and riddles kick-start creative thinking and association, and not least expand young people’s vocabulary and, in older children, improve reading comprehension. Logic-type tasks, meanwhile, set problem-solving and consistent reasoning in motion and develop mathematical skills.
On top of all this, solving even a single sub-task is of course a huge sense of achievement — let alone escaping successfully. Experiences of this kind can play their part in young people’s character development and in forming and deepening a positive self-image and healthy self-esteem.
The way an escape room runs requires the family to work together as a team, helping one another, and leaves it to the parent — or adult chaperone — to decide how much room to give the children to flourish. So with the right attitude, this adventurous, playful test, taking place in the controlled, safe environment of the room while pushing at the edges of the comfort zone, helps establish a kind of family hierarchy and deepens the children’s trust in their parent.
