Young people’s critical thinking skills can be strengthened with the help of digital escape rooms. They create an interactive environment where students must analyse information, make decisions, and defend their choices by fusing puzzles, teamwork, and real-world challenges.

The Digital Escape Games for Social Entrepreneurship (DEGSE) project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme, shows how such tools can be used to teach key skills linked to social and entrepreneurial learning. Below are five practical ways educators can apply escape rooms to develop critical thinking in their classrooms or youth activities.

1. Using Complex Scenarios to Encourage Reasoning

Well-designed escape rooms include challenges that require logical connections between clues. For example, identifying the link between a social problem and a business solution encourages analytical thinking. Educators can design sequences that require comparing evidence, prioritising options, and anticipating consequences exactly the kind of reasoning used in real decision making.

Educators can design missions that mirror real social or economic dilemmas. This helps learners recognise that most problems have multiple possible solutions, encouraging flexible and strategic thinking.

2. Building Team Logic Through Shared Tasks

In most escape rooms, no single participant can solve everything alone. Learners must divide roles, manage time, and integrate ideas. This teamwork promotes structured argumentation: explaining, defending, and challenging opinions. Educators can observe and assess how learners articulate reasoning in group contexts a core element of critical thinking.

3. Encouraging Strategic Thinking and Adaptability

Escape rooms naturally create time pressure and unexpected turns. These elements push learners to test strategies and adjust when something fails. Educators can guide reflection by asking: Which strategy worked best? Why? What would you do differently next time? Such debriefing turns play into targeted cognitive learning.

4. Embedding Ethical and Social Dimensions

When the puzzles are linked to social themes such as climate change, equality, or local entrepreneurship, learners must balance efficiency with values. This integration of ethics and logic reflects the real challenges entrepreneurs face: thinking critically about both outcomes and impacts.

5. Extending Learning Through Digital Flexibility

Digital elements make these activities adaptable and inclusive. They can be conducted remotely, used across languages, and modified to fit different levels of complexity. DEGSE‘s toolkit and tutorial help educators design digital escape rooms that align with learning outcomes in entrepreneurship, social innovation, and teamwork.

Learning Through Discovery

Escape rooms combine engagement with purposeful reflection. When used thoughtfully, they enable educators to move beyond theory and give learners the opportunity to think through analysing, discussing, and evaluating every step. This is precisely how critical thinking becomes a habit, not just a skill.

Initiatives like DEGSE demonstrate how game-based learning can change traditional education into an introspective and exploratory process. Incorporating escape rooms into classes or workshops not only makes learning more interesting, but it also equips students to think critically, behave responsibly, and improve their communities.