Escape MD: Using an Escape Room as a Gamified Educational and Skill-Building Teaching Tool for Internal Medicine Residents

Purpose To create an innovative medicine-themed escape room (EsR) and assess its feasibility as a learner-centered educational model for medical trainees. This platform could be used to teach and reinforce medical knowledge as well as enhance team-building skills. Materials and Methods We created an internal medicine (IM) themed EsR, in which participants are locked and instructed to solve a series of puzzles using both medical and nonmedical concepts to "escape" the room within a given set of time. The players must use their critical thinking and communication skills to solve puzzles consisting of complex activities (such as image identification and object matching or retrieval) linked in a nonlinear pattern. A pre-activity survey was used to collect basic demographic information and initial perceptions of the activity. A post-activity survey consisting of a modified Likert scale and free-response questions was used to assess perceived activity use and satisfaction. The activity was followed by a debriefing session with a faculty member to reflect on individual and team-based learning. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board. Results Each week, a group of four to seven residents participated in a one-hour long EsR session, which was replicated 15 times over five weeks, for a total of 86 internal medicine residents. 76 of 86 residents completed the post-activity survey. Overall, residents expressed a high level of satisfaction with the session (x̄ = 4.89), found it fun to play (x̄ = 4.89), and felt immersed in medicine (x̄ = 3.95). Residents thought the activity was most suitable for reinforcing knowledge (x̄ = 4.26) and greatly tested their communication skills (x̄ = 4.48). Conclusion The medical EsR experience was enjoyed by the vast majority of residents with very positive oral and survey feedback. Hence, we successfully created an active, learner-centered, gamified teaching tool that can be used for teaching/reinforcing medical concepts in a fun, competitive, and team-building format. The EsR, as a teaching tool, can be replicated with ease several times and requires very few resources to create.