Using an Escape-Room-Themed Curriculum to Engage and Educate Generation Z Students About Entomology

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A technology becomes more advanced, it is a continuous challenge to incorporate new and interesting tools to engage and educate our youth about entomology. Generation Z students are students who were born after 1995 into an Internet-connected world, and as a result, they thrive on visual learning through interactive games, challenges, and collaborative projects (Rothman 2016, Cilliers 2017). Given the importance of insects within diverse areas of study, we should provide new and unique methodologies to educate our youth about insects. Generations growing up with technology have been shown to be less interested in auditory learning, preferring more active participation to traditional passive learning (Chun et al. 2015). As a result, educators are being encouraged to incorporate alternative forms of education, such as gamification, flipped and interactive classrooms, social media, and massive open online courses into their curricula (Chun et al. 2015).

Game-based pedagogy has become a novel tool in supplementing traditional education (Becker 2017), while providing a resource that can engage both advanced and disadvantaged students (Elliott 2014). In a survey of 700 K–8 teachers, 74% reported using games in the classroom (Takeuchi and Vaala 2014). However, to be successful as a teaching tool, game-based lessons should be problem-focused and provide deeper context to the educational content (Shultz Colby 2017). Although the popularity of escape rooms has increased only recently over the past 10 years, they are gradually being utilized in classrooms because they are often problem-based and can aid in communication and collaboration, especially within the STEM fields (Williams 2018). Escape rooms differ from other forms of games in that students are tasked with problem-solving within a specified amount of time, and they require the use of various puzzles and challenges, providing both suspense and reward as different activities are solved. The use of escape-room lesson plans has recently been demonstrated in various scientific disciplines, such as teaching pharmacy students about diabetes (Eukel et al. 2017), motivating learning in the computer sciences (Borrego et al. 2017), learning about library services (Wise et al. 2018), and teaching students about physics (Vörös and Sárközi 2017).