![]() The educational escape game framework would help researchers focussing on important and difficult aspects of designing and implementing educational escape rooms to develop and research more effective escape rooms. Implications for practice and/or policy The educational escape game framework would help educators creating immersive games, which not only confront learners with meaningful contexts but also give learning gains. However, it scarcely led to collaborative learning during gameplay, due to lack of discussion and reflection needed for deeper understanding. Students' collaboration was successfully fostered. The used hybrid escape boxes contributed most to the immersion scaffolding students to focus on each other and the tasks. It informs that all three design elements contributed to students' appreciation of the escape room, whereas only immersion had a direct contribution to knowledge gain. It investigates the influence of the educational game design elements immersion, collaboration and debriefing, on fostering learning with a hybrid educational escape room. What this paper adds This paper evaluates an educational game design framework for escape rooms, focussing on the above‐mentioned main challenges in designing educational games. Three main challenges in designing educational games are (1) the participants' transition from the real world to the game world, (2) the alignment of game design aspects and educational aspects and (3) the transfer from attained experiences and knowledge back into the real world. For digital educational games, important game design aspects are researched. Teachers design their educational escape rooms based on digital escape games and/or their experience as players of escape rooms. Review studies on educational escape rooms show that a systematic evaluation is usually absent, disputable or indicates no knowledge gain. The assumption is that escape rooms support collaboration and automatically collaborative learning. Students and teachers perceive that while participating in escape rooms, students are more engaged, active and learn more compared to regular classes. Teachers implement escape rooms to create active (hybrid) learning spaces, where learners need a combination of knowledge and skills to solve the subject‐based activities. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic The escape room as a learning environment appeals to teachers of different disciplines, ages, gender and teaching experiences. The study confirms the usability of the framework for game designs, based on theories for the design of physical and hybrid educational games. Unexpectedly, these roles also scaffolded collaboration except for students in the school that engaged in a collaborative learning pedagogy. Also, a narrative with distinct roles for each student helped to evoke immersion. Immersion helps students focus on each other and the tasks. Based on the qualitative data it appeared that the used escape boxes contributed most to perceived immersion. Correlational analysis showed that all three design elements contributed to students' appreciation of the escape room, whereas only immersion had a direct contribution to knowledge gain. The results show a knowledge gain between pre‐and post‐test. The game experience was measured through questionnaires, classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers. Measures for learning were pre‐and post‐tests. One‐hundred‐and‐twenty‐six students, aged between 16 and 20 played the escape room. We based the design of the escape room on an educational game design framework that aligns the learning goal and the game goal, that is, escaping from the room. This study investigates the influence of the educational game design elements immersion, collaboration and debriefing, on fostering learning with educational escape rooms.
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