Can You Make it Back to Earth? A Digital Educational Escape Room for Secondary Chemistry Education to Explore Selected Principles of Green Chemistry

Chemistry is essential to address global challenges, like the reduction of resource consumption. One of the ways to make chemical processes more effective, environmentally friendly, and safer is through green chemistry. The associated changes inspired by green chemistry should also have an impact on chemistry education. Many researchers have called for the introduction of green chemistry in chemistry education. However, most proposals for bringing green chemistry into education only aim at the tertiary educational level. At the same time, an up-and-coming field of education focuses on game-based education in general and educational escape rooms in particular. Escape rooms can be used to promote subject content learning and to develop interdisciplinary skills playfully. This article presents a digital educational escape room on selected principles of green chemistry for high school chemistry education. The educational escape room was tested with 91 high school students. Students were motivated by the activity and learned about green chemistry on a reproducible level, but they also developed interest and positive attitudes. The students favored the more frequent use of educational escape rooms in the classroom, but some would prefer analog formats instead of digital ones.