Improving Pediatric Nursing Undergraduate Education: An Escape Room on Dehydration in Children

Nursing education aims to equip students with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors required for safe and effective professional practice. However, traditional teacher-centered approaches are often insufficient for developing competencies such as critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, communication, and teamwork.Consequently, innovative student-centered teaching strategies are increasingly being integrated into nursing education.Game-based learning is one such strategy that enhances engagement, motivation, active participation, and collaborative learning. Among GBL approaches, the educational escape room combines gamification with problem-solving by requiring students to work collaboratively under time constraints to solve realistic clinical scenarios. This method promotes active learning while strengthening communication, teamwork, leadership, and clinical reasoning skills. Educational escape rooms have been successfully implemented in several areas of nursing education, including women's health, pediatric care, geriatric nursing, cardiovascular diseases, clinical skills, teamwork, and leadership. Despite these developments, evidence regarding their use in pediatric nursing education remains limited.Dehydration is one of the most common pediatric health problems and requires nurses to accurately assess hydration status, recognize clinical findings, and implement appropriate nursing interventions. Competence in dehydration management is therefore essential for pediatric nursing students. To date, no published study has evaluated an educational escape room designed specifically to teach pediatric dehydration management.

This study aims to examine the effectiveness of an educational escape room implemented during a pediatric nursing laboratory simulation on nursing students' hydration knowledge, teamwork, and anxiety levels. It is expected that this innovative educational approach will enhance students' knowledge acquisition and teamwork skills while reducing anxiety during learning.