Virtual Reality Check: Checking Design Considerations for Reflection in Virtual Reality Educational Escape Rooms with Users

Escape rooms are becoming increasingly popular as gamified learning environments, often realized using Virtual Reality (VR) to engage students in playful, immersive educational experiences. Prior work has additionally suggested that the escape room format offers an opportunity for immersive reflective prompting, a scaffold shown to improve the learning outcomes of VR learning applications, by leveraging the presence and role of the game master (GM). Here, we build upon this idea by operationalizing guidelines from prior work as actionable instructions for prompting reflection in an educational VR escape room. We conducted a user study ( n = 14) and, from a thematic analysis of post-play interviews, we explored the experience of and reactions to reflection in VR educational escape rooms under this design paradigm. Findings confirm the value of the approach to reflection, but also reveal additional implications for improving immersive reflective prompts in educational VR escape rooms, with less disruption, deeper reflection, and more engagement.