Original title: The Weekend Call Shift Gone Awry: An Open-Source, Portable Radiology Escape Room for Undergraduate Medical Education
Jonathan Martin, Blaire Rikard · August 2026
Medical training is using games to help students stay engaged and remember clinical skills, but radiology has fewer published escape rooms than other fields. To help fix this, researchers built an open-source, portable escape room for medical students. It uses a story where students show up for a weekend hospital shift and find their supervising resident missing. Over forty minutes, student teams solve linked puzzles while answering urgent hospital pages that ask for imaging advice and scan interpretations. To win, they must rescue the resident by solving an MRI safetyRules designed to prevent harm in the strong magnetic field of an MRI scanner, such as removing metal objects. puzzle. This setup tests imaging rules, anatomy, scan reading, contrast reaction management, and teamwork. The researchers measured results using surveys after the game. Medical students gave positive feedback and reported improved knowledge of imaging appropriateness. The authors concluded that portable escape rooms provide an adaptable, low-resource way to teach relevant radiology content.
You are organizing a surprise party with a friend who suddenly disappears mid‑plan. Without them, you have to juggle multiple tasks: decide what food to order, check for allergies, and coordinate the arrival time, all while keeping the birthday person distracted. The clock ticks down and one wrong choice could ruin everything. In this paper, the tasks are clinical decisions like choosing the right scan, and the missing friend is the supervising resident—the escape room forces teams to keep solving under time pressure while the central figure is absent.
Medical students need to learn radiology reasoning, safety, and teamwork. Traditional lectures often fail to engage them or show how these skills connect in real time. This paper describes a low-cost, portable escape room that packs multiple clinical objectives into one immersive session, making it easy for any medical school to adopt without expensive equipment.
The abstract reports outcomes only from post‑session surveys, so there is no data on long‑term retention or comparison with other teaching methods. It does not mention a control group or pre‑post knowledge tests beyond self‑reported improvement. The paper focuses on describing the design and implementation, so the evidence for effectiveness remains preliminary until tested more rigorously.
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The Weekend Call Shift Gone Awry: An Open-Source, Portable Radiology Escape Room for Undergraduate Medical Education — Jonathan Martin, Blaire Rikard — EdArXiv — doi:10.35542/osf.io/mcbqh_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.