The Co-Creation of a Digital Escape Room Designed to Develop Students’ Digital Confidence

Honeychurch, S. , Offord, M. , Quinn, N. , Barr, M. and Mullen, H. (2021) The Co-Creation of a Digital Escape Room Designed to Develop Students’ Digital Confidence. SocMedHE21, 14 Dec 2021.

Abstract

Over the summer of 2021 a group of academics at the University of Glasgow with an interest in Game-Based Learning (GBL) worked with a student intern in order to develop an escape room for use in a level 1 Management course (Principles of Management). As keen believers in the power of staff-student partnerships, we wanted this project to be led by our student intern. So we put together some of the reading that had inspired us, including an article by Rachelle O’Brien and Scott Farrow, and formed a sub-group with two academics to act as sponsors for the project and the student intern as development lead and content developer. After an initial briefing meeting to scope the project out, we gave her free rein to develop an escape room. She chose OneNote as the platform for the game because she appreciated how useful this had been in helping to organise her work in her honours years, and wished she had been introduced to it right from the beginning of her academic career. She also decided to design tasks that she had found useful in her freshers orientation and adapt them for online use as well as working with the course co-ordinator to build in course-specific tasks. The end result exceeded all of our expectations. We embedded the escape room into the course VLE (which had a section for games and social activities) and also made it a core activity by setting it as a group task in an early synchronous lecture, thus emphasising to all students how important an activity it was. We also set up an online survey and collected feedback from students at the end of the game. This presentation will talk through the design and development of the room and show the final result. We will also provide the results of the student survey. Participants will have the opportunity to try the escape room for themselves, and we will also make the room itself and some basic user guides available to anyone wanting to develop their own version.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Quinn, Dr Nick and Mullen, Dr Helen and Offord, Dr Matt and Honeychurch, Dr Sarah and Barr, Dr Matthew
• Authors: Honeychurch, S., Offord, M., Quinn, N., Barr, M., and Mullen, H.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science; College of Social Sciences > Adam Smith Business School > Management; University Services > Learning and Teaching Services Division

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