A Digital Escape Room for Research Skills
Hi all,
Escape rooms are an exciting area of educational development that are becoming increasingly popular in health education disciplines. This is not surprising as they can be fun, collaborative, active learning experiences that can be facilitated both face to face and online (even at scale).
Having had the pleasure of developing and supporting a number of these in the Faculty we can confirm there is a real buzz in the classroom (or on Teams) as student groups collaboratively unpick the puzzles and work hard to complete their escape rooms before others. staff and student feedback is also always overwhelmingly positive.
In response to this we thought it would be helpful to share more information about one of the bigger digital escape rooms (approx 200 students at a time) we have helped Faculty colleagues develop and deliver repeatedly over the last few years.
The nursing 4101 digital escape room was originally developed in 2020 by the TEL team in collaboration with Pam Donaghy and Clare Van Miert to try and encourage teams of 1st year nursing degree students to learn about research by actively using research skills. The escape room contains 12 locked rooms/pages with variously playful and complex activities within. Upon completion of each task students receive or uncover an access code to enter the next room. The activites are designed using Canvas and in house software, though a wide range of tools can be used to produce tasks and access codes for progression.
The 4101 escape room sessions are delivered face to face now with students in groups of 4-5 sharing digital devices. The team’s publication on this particular educational intervention provides more details https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/1003.
Keep an eye out for a gamification in health session at the end of this month if you want to explore other approaches to making your sessions more engaging.
If you want to learn more about escape rooms feel free to get in touch with the Faculty of Health TEL team.