Participants will experience and unpack multiple digital escape room puzzles, each designed with distinct learning purposes. Through play and guided reflection, you’ll explore how online escape rooms can transform professional learning and development, and leave equipped with a practical, research-informed framework for designing your own experiential learning adventures.

Overview and Relevance
What if learning felt like play but with real outcomes? Educational escape rooms offer far more than entertainment. When intentionally designed, they serve as powerful, measurable environments for experiential learning across sectors, from K–12 classrooms and universities to corporate training and professional development. This 90-minute workshop invites participants to experience, debrief, and strategize digital escape room puzzles that bring learning to life.
Escape rooms have emerged as a flexible, engaging approach to online and blended learning. They combine storytelling, problem-solving, and collaboration to create low-risk spaces for experimentation and meaningful challenge. When structured intentionally, they align closely with experiential learning principles, allowing participants to learn by doing, reflect on decisions, and connect those experiences to key competencies.
Session Description and Plan
This highly interactive workshop is structured around three phases: Play, Reflect, and Apply. Participants will first experience several short escape room puzzles, each representing a distinct learning purpose and delivery mode (synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid). The puzzles will model different uses of technology to illustrate that meaningful digital learning design doesn’t depend on high-budget tools but on intentional design choices.
After each short puzzle, participants engage in a guided reflection conversation. Together, the group will unpack what made each puzzle engaging, how it supported learning, and what underlying design decisions shaped that experience. This debrief connects puzzle design to foundational learning theories and emphasizes the relationship between purpose and puzzle.
Building on this shared experience, the workshop transitions into a brief presentation of the 5-step design process for escape rooms for learning, a practical framework developed and refined through years of facilitation:
Purpose – Define the learning goal driving all design decisions.


Character – Center the learner’s role and perspective to build engagement.


Situation – Design context-rich challenges that create the conditions for learning.


Puzzle – Structure meaningful problems that connect directly to learning objectives.


Storytelling – Create coherence, motivation, and immersion through narrative design.


The emphasis of this session will emphasize the first and fourth steps (i.e. purpose and puzzles), two deeply interconnected and often challenging steps to designing effective learning escape rooms. Participants will explore examples, consider practical design prompts, and begin sketching applications for their own contexts, whether that’s an online course module, a corporate training activity, or a K-12 team-building challenge.
Learning Across Sectors
While the background for this session is rooted in higher education and professional learning, escape rooms translate across sectors because they are grounded in human motivation, not modality. They engage curiosity, narrative, and problem-solving.
In an era of AI-enabled tools and expanding virtual learning ecosystems, educators and learning designers are reimagining how to make digital learning human, interactive, and purpose-driven. Escape rooms, when used as intentional experiential design, offer a way to do exactly that and make learning active, social, and impactful.
Engagement and Takeaways
The workshop’s design is interactive and participatory throughout; attendees will both hear about escape room puzzles and experience them. The live puzzles will be digital by design, using a variety of tools (from free to paid subscriptions) so participants can immediately see how to adapt similar methods in their own work.
After the debrief and mini-presentation, attendees will break into small groups to brainstorm how they could apply these ideas to their own learning environments. Facilitators will provide visual prompts to support ideation.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:
Explain how escape rooms can be designed as powerful experiential learning environments in digital contexts.


Identify how aligning puzzle purpose with learning goals drives engagement and measurable outcomes.


Apply the 5-step design process to conceptualize their own educational escape room, focusing on purpose and puzzles.


Evaluate how different digital tools and modalities support online and blended escape room experiences.


Think about how to apply the five step design process — specifically purpose and puzzles — to their learning spaces and to advance specific competencies.


Conclusion
This session invites educators, instructional designers, and L&D professionals to experience the future of online learning—one where curiosity, play, and purpose work together to create engaging, measurable outcomes. By blending creativity and research-informed design, this workshop offers both inspiration and actionable strategies for building human-centered learning adventures.

Engagement Plan: Play + Reflect + Apply:
Play:
Participants begin by playing short, purpose-driven puzzles in different modalities (e.g., digital breakout, interactive form, or collaborative challenge). These experiences model how different types of puzzles facilitate distinct learning goals.

Reflect:
A guided debrief connects each puzzle’s structure to experiential learning theory, unpacking how design choices impact engagement, cognitive load, and skill development.

Apply:
Facilitators introduce the 5-step design framework (Purpose, Character, Situation, Puzzle, Storytelling). Participants discuss and sketch ways to apply these principles—particularly purpose and puzzles—to their own digital or hybrid learning environments.

Resource Kit:
Attendees leave with free digital templates, planning tools, and examples to adapt for their own instructional, training, or professional learning contexts.

Laura Geringer

Educational Escape Room at PumpkinBerry Consulting

Laura Geringer helps leaders make ideas visible, collaboration engaging, and learning fun. As a multi-passionate creative, she combines visual thinking, experiential learning, and community engagement to create unique experiences that change makers want to be part of. She's known for her combination of ingenuity and organization: designing highly creative solutions and the processes to make them reality.

With her M.Ed. in International Higher Education and 13+ years combining value-centric project design with visual media, Laura partners with learning & development leaders to engage communities, facilitate innovation, and produce resources that move the needle. At the heart of her work is the belief that we can create better, more human futures through collaboration, learning, and value-centric leadership. With this priority in mind, Laura founded PumpkinBerry Consulting, a creative design studio specializing in learning experience design and graphic facilitation.