On Friday, I had the privilege of attending the online Escape Room Showcase organised by the Learning and Teaching Academy, Herriot-Watt University (@LTA_HWU). I had an absolutely fantastic time! My day started early with a desert island-themed escape room where I worked with a small group of other academics over Teams to break out. While we didn’t manage within the time (we had 45 minutes when it usually runs for an hour), we did have lots of fun. It was a great showcase of the capabilities of OneNote for building virtual escape rooms. Leading on from this, there was an excellent keynote from Prof Nic Whitton where she challenged us to “escape” the session by solving three puzzles. My key takeaway was that teamwork is vital to the success of an escape room. When designing, you should include a range of puzzles as not every type of puzzle will suit everyone. That was definitely my experience of this session. I solved one puzzle immediately but another had me stumped and I wouldn’t have got it without a hint.
The highlight of my day was probably the short talk from Tim Cappelli and Hayley Hewitt on applying nursing skills in a real-world immersive escape room. They created a virtual escape room using a platform called Thinglink which challenged their nursing students to “move” around a nursing home, solving puzzles and unlocking more rooms. To make it more authentic, the setting was a real nursing home which they gained permission to photograph using a 3D camera. So cool! The puzzles were all set around infection control which to be honest, I didn’t find very interesting as a medical student. I think this was a fantastic way to engage students with the topic and I would have loved to have done this escape room myself as an undergraduate.
There was plenty of chat about the different software and platforms which can be used for creating virtual escape rooms throughout the day. As someone new to this, that was really useful. It was reassuring to see how it doesn’t need to be complicated. Virtual escape rooms can be built using OneNote and Microsoft Forms which most academics will likely already have access to through an institutional Microsoft 365 license. The platform that most interested me was H5P which I to make the two puzzles below. As long as you’re prepared to host it on your own site, it’s free to use. I thought the guide on the H5P website for installing and using the WordPress plugin was very clear. It took me maybe 15 minutes to make these two puzzles.
There was plenty of chat throughout the day about the different software and platforms which can be used for creating virtual escape rooms. As someone new to this, that was really useful. It was reassuring to see how it doesn’t need to be complicated. Virtual escape rooms can be built using OneNote and Microsoft Forms which most academics will likely already have access to through an institutional Microsoft 365 license. The platform that most interested me was H5P which I used to make the two puzzles below. As long as you’re prepared to host it on your own site, it’s completely free to use. I thought the guide on the H5P website for installing and using the WordPress plugin was very clear. It took me maybe 15 minutes to make these two puzzles.
Overall, I had a fantastic day and I’m full of ideas for building my first escape room! Gamification is becoming more widely used in education and I think that’s a positive thing.