Relativity of Mindfulness: Team Collaboration in Digital and Physical Educational Escape Rooms

This study focuses on collaboration among team members in educational escape rooms in higher education. The objective of this study was to understand how collective mindfulness and less mindful behavior unfold in physical and digital game-based learning. The video data were collected from three different courses comprising 107 students on 28 teams, totaling more than 16 hours of material. The qualitative analysis revealed both collectively mindful and less mindful behaviors in team interactions. This paper contributes to collective mindfulness literature in understanding team collaboration by observing that mindfulness may be relative depending on the observation perspective. It also presents factors that affect member equality in both digital and physical escape rooms. Lastly, a nuanced description of how team collaboration occurred in a short-term problem-solving situation is developed.