Overcoming the red tape: The challenges of designing and evaluating a digital escape room platform.

Jones, Matthew; Morgan, Nicky

Abstract

With students increasingly accessing content via digital sources rather than in-person due to factors including the increased cost of living, identifying new ways to engage students via digital mediums is paramount. One example of this is digital escape rooms. Digital escape rooms offer a fun and interactive way for students to evaluate and apply their knowledge to enhance their understanding and how to apply this to real-world scenarios. Through experiences with other digital escape rooms that have been created at a subject-specific level (Ang et al., 2020; Horn, 2023), we developed and implemented a central university-wide platform for the creation of digital escape room content across the University of Salford. However, throughout this process there were many technical and logistical challenges in creating a platform that adds pedagogical value across the institution and facilitates student engagement.
These challenges ranged from logistical, workload and student-facing issues, with examples including how do you ensure the long-term future of a digital platform with finite funding? How do you ensure adequate value for the workload used to create the platform? How do you encourage students to participate and provide informative feedback for further project development? How do you expand the reach and content of your platform sustainably? All these issues played integral roles in adapting the direction of platform development and the enhancements made along the way to ensure a positive student experience and inform how we created further escape rooms within the platform. With many of these challenges only emerging upon commencement of the project, through this talk, we aim to showcase how we overcame these and inform prospective creators of the issues faced.

Citation

Jones, M., & Morgan, N. (2024, May). Overcoming the red tape: The challenges of designing and evaluating a digital escape room platform. Presented at Escape Rooms in Education 2024, Online

• Presentation Conference Type: Speech
• Conference Name: Escape Rooms in Education 2024
• Conference Location: Online
• Start Date: May 10, 2024
• End Date: May 10, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jun 5, 2024
• Publisher URL: https://lta.hw.ac.uk/escape-rooms-in-education-showcase/