Скачать или смотреть L&T Conf 2021: Not just another escape room – students building OneNote escape rooms

Presented by:

James Gaynor
(University of Liverpool)

Description:
The boom in using escape rooms as a form of gamification in education has been fascinating, particularly for the avid escape room enthusiast, like me, frustrated by the pandemic. Day 2 of the 2020 L&T conference, which used Canvas as an escape room, was inspiring and paved the way for work here.

Rather than creating an escape room for students to complete, we placed students into the role of content-developer and had them develop their own spectroscopy escape rooms. This resulted in 33 virtual spectroscopy escape rooms of varying quality, with the initial idea to have an element of peer review (this unfortunately didn’t happen in the end).

Various tools are possible for creating virtual escape rooms, such as Google Forms, which probably have a more dynamic output than OneNote. However, OneNote was the clear choice as it is part of the Microsoft suite with escape room templates available. OneNote is also a tool that has wider uses in employment and for remote-learning organisation, so the opportunity to show students a new piece of software was desirable.

Supportive material was developed by a summer student with helpful advice given by colleagues in CIE. We had a scaffolding session where students completed a a OneNote escape room; this was in week 1 of the academic year and was where we realised that OneNote can be a little temperamental. We will discuss the limitations of OneNote and want to share our experiences of what needs to be considered before others consider similar activities. Feedback from the activity was highly mixed; lots of students saw the benefit of the activity but issues with OneNote (and normal issues of group dynamics) were a little restrictive. But with a little reimagining, this activity could work throughout the institution.

For more information the University of Liverpool’s Centre for Innovation in Education: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/centre-fo...