The Great Accounting Escape: A Teaching Tool for Relevant Costing and Short-Term Decisions

Abstract

This teaching case creates an Escape Room experience for managerial accounting students to reinforce relevant costing and short-term decision concepts. Within the Escape Room, students analyze five short-term decisions within 50 minutes to “escape” for the weekend. Specifically, students identify relevant information, perform the necessary calculations, and evaluate their results to make a recommendation on how to improve firm profitability. The Escape Room seeks to build a greater understanding of relevant costing by creating a narrative, linking the five short-term decisions, and formatting every decision using an input-process-output (IPO) framework. The Escape Room also uses gamification elements to promote engagement and interest in learning these concepts. Students agree that the Escape Room increases engagement and fosters an understanding of relevant costing and short-term decision concepts. We see one of the strongest benefits of the Escape Room is its ability to scale across class formats and provide automatic feedback to students. Data Availability: Data are available upon request.