The Benefits of Escape Rooms in Education with Dr Geoffrey Chapman

Dr Geoffrey Chapman is a lecturer at CQU in Sydney and passionate about gamification. He has introduced his love for escape rooms into his tertiary classroom. During Covid, he translated them into the online learning space and is now using them in his postgraduate teaching. They are great for team building, clear objectives and a bit of time pressure. His students love them. Get in touch with Geoff if you would like to learn more. g.chapman@cqu.edu.au

Transcript

Ellie: Welcome to our podcast. My name's Ellie and I'm from the AARE Technology and Learning, special interest group.  we recently met at a conference, Geoff, and if you could just quickly introduce yourself and then we're going to talk about your exciting project that I've learned about at that conference.

Geoff: Sure, no worries. Thanks, Ellie. So my name is Geoff Chapman, and I'm a lecturer at CQ University. I'm based down in Sydney, and yeah, I teach into, all kinds of management, HR, organisational behaviour, types of units. I'm happy to talk about one of the more recent, teaching innovations, I guess you could call it, that I've been implementing in some of my classes.

Ellie: Amazing. So. And that makes us think about why we invited you to our podcast. We're going to talk about your exciting, escape rooms. So I was fortunate enough to be in the session with you and go through that, which was my very first escape room ever, let alone, on the computer. And so I really wanted you to tell us more about that and you know, for our members to learn about that because it was great fun. And so my first question is how that all came about?

Geoff: Escape rooms are sort of a phenomenon that's been growing for the last decade or so. I did my first one in 2016. And so the idea of an escape room, when it's done in person, there's a lot of commercial companies out there that will, run these as a business. The idea is that you get locked in a room and you have to work with the group of people, literally, and solve a series of puzzles and challenges and sort of look for clues and unlock box doors and find codes and you sort of get your way out of the room.  So, after I did, my first one, it took a few years, I did a few more. I got very obsessed with them. I thought they were great, and I thought, there's got to be a way I can bring this dynamic into the classroom. Just because they're such great environments where team building sort of gets fostered really quickly, you get this great sense of flow when you're doing an escape room, because you've got this really clear set of objectives, you've got time pressure, you've got all these elements which just get people focused on the task. So, I started doing some versions of the escape room in the class, and they were really fun. I sort of just found my own materials and, put things together, and they worked great. But that was in 2019. And shortly thereafter, we didn't have many on campus classes anymore thanks to Covid. So that was where the online escape room activity really came from, the fact that I had this activity I was doing in the classroom, and then needed to convert that to an online activity of some kind.

Ellie: So it sounds like you're very passionate about your escape rooms. 

Geoff: Very much so. 

Ellie: So lots of fun. And, I mean, we do want to have some fun in the classroom. What was your key sort of rationale, I guess, when you implemented that initially into your classroom and what sort of class, so our listeners understand, sort of the context for your teaching?

Geoff: Yeah. The classes that I initially, was putting it into, and at this point I'm still using the same kinds of classes, would be my postgraduate classes. So students who are a little bit older, a little bit more capable of taking initiatives. That being said, I feel that this is an activity which is very, adaptable. It's very flexible and very able to be set up for whatever kind of cohort you would be running it with. My rationale behind it is that when you develop, sort of an escape room style activity, if you're the one that is building it, if you're making all of the puzzles and making all of the challenges and the things that the students will have to do to escape the room, it's really easy. Well not always easy, but it's easy enough to build in, like unit specific concepts, things that are relevant to whatever that particular course is talking about. So the one that you saw at the conference that I presented was looking at the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And so all the questions that you had to answer in order to make your way out of the room required you to have some knowledge of those sustainable development goals. And if you didn't have that knowledge, it was things you could fairly easily look up at the time. And so it also then becomes a way of delivering, information as well as just revising and testing. So, yeah, I just think there's a lot of potential in the way that the activity is set up to, deliver unit content in a really engaging way.

Ellie: Right. Yeah, that was certainly my experience at the conference. So speaking of the engaging ways. So tell us a bit more on how you do it, because from what I saw, there is a lot of work you put into that. So talk us through a bit of that.

Geoff: Yeah, setting up the online, escape room activity was a lot of work at the front end. Once it is developed, it becomes a lot easier to then implement on a term by term basis, because I don't have to do too much really to get it set up to offer a for the subsequent terms. But getting it set up in the first place is the challenge. Because, yeah, you need to sort of think about what kind of questions and things you would put in there. And for me, the real challenge was finding a way to sort of capture those really great elements of what an escape room brings in an in-person setting to an online setting. So, I sort of, I sat down with a checklist of things that I really wanted to get, and I wanted it to be an environment where students felt that they were in the same space. So I didn't want it, that every student sort of had their own link to their own activity, and they're all basically just doing it independently. I wanted it to be something that they all felt that they were in the same room at the same time. I needed to be able to see what they were doing. I needed to be able to access their room so I could help them if they were getting stuck. And I needed it to be using software which was readily accessible and sort of didn't create a bit of an access issue when it came to students logging in from different places on different devices and so on. So my solution to all of that was to set this up using Google Sheets, which a lot of people hear in the first place and think, oh, so it just looks like spreadsheet. Right? But as you would have seen earlier Ellie when I demonstrated.

Ellie: It does not!

Geoff: It doesn't look like a spreadsheet at all. It's using images and it's using, a lot of, complex, formulas, which, yeah, make it feel a lot more like, you know, obviously you'll never feel like you're in a room. It's not virtual reality. It's still a picture on the screen, but it gives a sense of exploration. It gives a sense of freedom, that students can pretty much type in whatever they want to look at. And if it's something that's relevant, it will show them that on the screen. So, I was able to then use that as the bones of the room, and I could then populate that with unit specific questions and challenges, which, was sort of a mix of, content, type questions. Just, do you know what SDG? number this is, as well as a few more general knowledge or sort of lateral thinking style challenges,
which is what escape rooms are really about. Sort of that problem solving element where, you rely on different strengths of people in the team. Some people will be great with the academic style cognitive questions or other people will be really good at just that, looking at in a different way and sort of chiming in with, ‘has anyone tried typing in this?’ And that's the answer. So yeah, yeah, you get a really good mix of students having input in different ways. 

Ellie: Which brings us to the obvious question, for I'm sure some listeners go, “oh you know, I've never done one. I would be so anxious, so what if we can, figure it out.” What's your sort of feedback from your students and the impact this is having on what you were hoping for?

Geoff: I have got some, data from focus groups. A part of the initial rollout of this was tied in with a Learning and Teaching Grant, which had a research project attached to it. So I have got some, feedback from students in focus groups. And by and large, it is very positive feedback. Students report that this is a very new activity, something that never seen before, something that they weren't expecting to be doing in that course. But they generally really enjoy it. There is an element of reluctance at times. And a lot of that will come down to the group that the students are placed with. And this is more sort of my observations, having run this a few times. If a student who's a little bit reluctant to get engaged is with a group of students who do engage, they will very quickly get engaged too. It's just a matter of sort of being in a room where other people are like, “let's try this”, “let's try that.” “Hey, what do you think?” And they get involved and they become really engaged in the activity very quickly. If there's a group where none of the students really want to engage, it's hard because it's sort of that - and it's the same thing you see in the class. If you've got a whole bunch of students that just don't want to engage, it can be a bit of a battle to get them to do it. I've found in most cases I can usually get around that by jumping into the same - So I'll split a class of, say, 30 students up into six groups of five. So I'll run six groups at the same time, and I'll jump around between the groups to make sure they're not getting stuck anywhere. And if I come across a group that is struggling a bit and they're not, going too far, I'll have a chat to them. I’ll say, “All right, what are we thinking?” “How are we going here?” And I'll sort of show them the first few steps, and then they start to get the idea, and then it usually will just flow on from there. And they get into it and start going. I do a lot of activities that are based on the philosophy of gamification. That's one of my teaching philosophies that I lean on very heavily. I find the use of games, game based, learning to be a really effective way to get students on board, and I found this particular activity to be one of the most effective in terms of getting students engaged. Yeah. Which is saying something because it's an online based activity and that is typically extremely hard to get students aged in that environment.

Ellie: Amazing. Awesome. If someone wants to start doing this. You know, using escape rooms to whatever extent in their classroom, what's your top tips on where to get started?

Geoff: It comes down to a few, I guess, key questions that people would have to ask. The first probably most important one would be, do you have access to funding? Because these things won't necessarily be cheap.But there are ways around that if you don't have money. So if you've got a lot of money, you can contact, an escape room company and they will develop these activities for you. But they are pricey. I was in touch with a number of companies when I was developing this one, just to get a sense of what kind of things could be done and how they would do it. And like the lower end of the figures they were quoting were like $50,000 to make just one of these rooms, which you wouldn't even necessarily get ongoing access to. So it's sort of like. “Yeah, that's not really within my budget.” But you know. 

Ellie: Yeah. So I hope CQ University is very appreciative of your initiative. (laughs)

Geoff: Well, I think when you go to those companies, they probably will develop a product that won't use Google Sheets. It will be a little bit more like, you know, computer game style graphics in your first-person dynamics where you'll be able to move around inside a space. Which is good in some extent. But for a group based learning activity, I find that can also be a bit limiting. With a lower amount of cash, you can certainly look into doing things like collaborating, with me, for instance. I don't charge anywhere near as much as those companies, and I'm happy to sort of go through and help to set up the bones of one of these activities for people. But people can also just give it a crack themselves. There's no sort of rules around how these things work. The in-class escape room activities I did, I literally just made using, like, documents that I typed things into. Then cut out with scissors and left bits of paper around. And just using a bit of creativity, like hiding things under chairs or hiding them in pens and giving students clues to look in the pen. “Oh, there's some other thing there.” It's all just about, sort of, having that sense of problem solving and exploration. And the great thing with escape rooms is what I call the ‘Ah ha!’ moments. Where you realise what the answer is, and you have this sense “Ahhhh, that's it, I've got it.” And when you see students doing these, it's just so great seeing them when they have those ‘Ah ha!’ moments and they get the answer.

Ellie: thank you so much for your time today to speak with me. And I'm sure you’ll get a bit of traffic soon when we release our podcast from April. Thank you so much.