Digital educational escape rooms have gained significant traction as pedagogical tools in recent years, especially during the rapid digital transition resulting from the recent COVID-19 pandemic where physical educational escape rooms were unable to be delivered. These digital educational escape rooms, mirror the concepts and puzzle design as those of ‘in-person’ escape rooms, however, utilising digital technologies such as 360° imaging and virtual reality to deliver puzzles as opposed to physical infrastructure. This provides higher education practitioners the opportunity to offer students the pedagogical benefits of escape rooms such as communication, teamwork and critical thinking, but at increased scale and at a higher throughput. Something which has become an increasingly important consideration with increasing student cohort sizes and increased academic workloads across the higher education sector.
At the University of Salford, we have developed an institution-wide digital escape room platform, known as UoScape, for the collaborative design and delivery of escape rooms to students across the institution to allow educational escape rooms to be delivered both synchronously and asynchronously to various disciplines simultaneously. Within this presentation, we will highlight the diverse variety of applications of digital escape rooms across our institution and how the concept of digital escape rooms can be used to support student academic transitioning into higher education, educational outreach and to enhance key higher education metrics including student experience, knowledge acquisition and overall degree value at a large scale with decreased academic and infrastructure demand.
