Will It Escape Room? Unlocking Game-Based Learning With Your Current Toolkit

Purpose & objective

The purpose of this presentation is to share fundamental techniques for creating game-based learning artifacts using an educator's current tech skillset. These techniques will be focused on creating digital escape rooms, but they can also be applied to creating a wide variety of digital learning artifacts. The presentation will also include a summary of my "Will It Escape Room?" project, which could provide educators with lots of tech tricks and tutorials using a variety of tools, but also provide an inspirational model of low-stakes experimentation.

Within the presentation, participants will have the chance to plan their own digital escape room activity and explore many other templates and examples. They will also be participating (as students) in a variety of digital interactions, such as collaborative Google Docs, and several escape-room-style activities.

As evidence of success, participants will be invited to share their progress at the end of the session, and the presenter will provide feedback and suggestions as time allows.

*NOTE: This presentation would be a follow-up companion offering to the "Digital Escape Room" Session I presented at ISTE in 2022. However, where that presentation was focused on a specific process and toolset for creating 1 escape room, this presentation would dive more into the principles of Game-Based learning and presenting a range of tech-agnostic strategies that would work with other tool-verses (Google, Microsoft, Apple, LMSes, etc.)

Outline

Part 0: What is Escape Room?
Participants will participate in a brief "generic escape room" activity (in order to familiarize them with the escape room concept) as a "bell ringer" to kick off the presentation.

Part 1: Why Escape Room?
A brief introduction to game-based learning principles, specifically:
- Learners have the power to affect their environment
- High stakes fantasy or narrative (competition and collaboration, novelty, etc.)
- Low "real world" stakes (freedom to fail, scaffolding, etc.)

Part 2: How Escape Room?
Simplifying a digital escape room activity to its core elements: Lock, Room, Path, Clue, Timer, and Puzzle, as well as the core mechanic behind it: Conditional Release of Content, and how these can be implemented with a wide variety of tech tools

Part 3: Will It Escape Room?
A brief review of my "Will It Escape Room?" experiment, in which I attempt to create escape room activities using a variety of tools and file types, including Canvas, PDFs, Google Drawings, Notion, One Note, YouTube, etc -- along with templates and examples of each experiment

Part 4: We'll Escape Room!
Using audience voting, combined with Generative AI tools, we'll all design a new custom escape room activity from scratch, using a unique combination of tools, topics, and techniques.

Supporting research

Maxwell Hartt , Hadi Hosseini & Mehrnaz Mostafapour (2020): Game On:
Exploring the Effectiveness of Game-based Learning, Planning Practice & Research, DOI: 10.1080/02697459.2020.1778859
Found at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459.2020.1778859

Educause Games and Learning Constituent Group (2014): 7 Things You Should Know about Games and Learning. Found at https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2014/3/eli7106-pdf.pdf

Ellis, Charlotte (2021): Online Escape Room Tool Guide. Found at https://celt.wp.derby.ac.uk/online-escape-room-tool-guide/