Escape Rooms in Education

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Unknown
Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining in.

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Unknown
So with us today, we have professor Nick Whitton.

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Unknown
So professor Nick Whitton is a professor of digital learning and play at Northumbria University. She is joining us from the UK.

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Unknown
She began her academic career with a degree in business management from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, followed by several years in the not for profit sector.

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Driven by a passion for learning, she returned to higher education in her late 20s to complete a master’s degree in information systems at Edinburgh University, before earning her PhD on the potential of collaborative video games for learning.

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Unknown
Her career has spanned a range of roles in learning, technology and academic development.

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in September 2023.

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Unknown
She joined Northumbria University, where she now leads pioneering work on playful learning in higher education.

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Professor Witten is also the principal investigator of the 1 Million Pound Replay Project, researching the effectiveness of playful learning in higher education, which is a three year study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and partner institutions. The project aims to provide robust evidence of the value of different approaches to playful learning across the education sector.

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Unknown
So she has expertise in playful learning, escape rooms, games, and everything

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Unknown
that comes in, in that.

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Unknown
Personally, I’ve had, I think one conversation with Nick and I’ve attended a few of her sessions, online, and she has always been an inspiration and I’ve always learned so much from her. So, Nick, thank you so much for being here.

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Unknown
We are extremely grateful for your time.

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Unknown
Oh, well, thank you. And thank you for such a lovely introduction. I’m blushing here. And thank you, everybody, for coming. And it’s lovely to meet you.

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Unknown
when I looked around at the escape rooms,

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Unknown
which is one of the things that I’m really interested in, I’ve been researching for a few years.

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Unknown
Again, this sort of focused on pedagogy, of escape rooms.

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Unknown
So this is a presentation that was kind of based on one that I did for a conference a few years ago.

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Unknown
And it gives example, if you haven’t done Escape Rooms before, exemplifies some of the ideas in a fairly kind of relaxed way, which doesn’t put anybody on the spot.

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Unknown
I’m going to move on to, a little bit about me. So,

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Unknown
basically, yeah, as I said, I’m a professor.

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Unknown
more than that, I really, really love escape rooms. I love dressing up, I like cocktails.

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Unknown
I do a bit of running, but that’s, mainly secondary to to dressing up and doing escape rooms.

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Unknown
Part of my whole ethos is very much just trying not to take myself too seriously.

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Unknown
I think there’s a bit of mystique around being a professor, and, a lot of what I do is just about going to actually just normal person with the fancy job title.

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Unknown
So I do trying very much to be kind of approachable and fun and silly and very much have an ethos of if if something seems really scary,

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and involves dressing up ideally as a pirate.

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Unknown
I will just put myself out there and try and do it.

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Unknown
During this talk, I’m going to ask you to find three words to be able to escape this workshop. If you’re not able to find these three words, then I’m afraid you’re stuck here for ever.

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Unknown
But just to kind of keep primed if if you can get, you might want some pencil and paper, but not necessary.

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Unknown
And what I’m trying to do with the puzzles is to kind of exemplify some of the points that I’m going to be making.

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Unknown
So back in 2014, one of my friends, Alex, who’s the guy on here, Alex Mosley, who, if you’re interested in games, nothing at all.

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Unknown
He had just seen this thing in London called hint, hint, which we’ve never come across before, and he said, it’s like we get locked in a room for an hour and they have four people and we have to solve puzzles, and if we don’t

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Unknown
solve them, we don’t get out. So it’s like, yeah, okay, we’ll do that.

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Unknown
So all four of us came from different bits of the country to London to, to just try out this new thing.

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Unknown
And it was the most mind blowing experience that I can remember. So this was this was 11 years ago. This was the only at this time escape room in the UK. And they actually company had two of them, and all four of us came out going.

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Unknown
That was amazing.

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Unknown
So actually, to come out and go this so much in here, we went, we came up with the pub, we sort of went, well, just think about it in terms of education.

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Unknown
Right from the minute we got in, we were all engaged. There was loads of stuff for us to do. We were all working really well together and it wasn’t really it wasn’t stressful because we knew the wasn’t the ending didn’t really matter, but we really, really all still wanted to get out in that time period. And if you compare that to what we do in education, it’s almost the opposite.

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Unknown
And, and then we have to it’s kind of half now we’re like, oh, we’ve got to go back and we’ve got to go back and play the other game. And of course we couldn’t get on because it was booked out for six months. But for me, that was a really sort of pivotal moment to going. There’s something about the collaboration, the timescale, the playfulness, the moving into that separate space that makes us really interesting and really good for learning.

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Unknown
So to feel for anyone who hasn’t played an escape room before, I’m going to start with a very easy puzzle.

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Unknown
So, puzzle number one.

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Unknown
Just looking for one word.

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Unknown
It is not types of animals. Wow. Patrick. That’s impressive. Okay, what’s that, like? Less than a minute. So I’m just going to to put you up to Patrick. And, do you want to explain to us how this works?

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Unknown
my first attempt was looking at the number and the placeholder of the characters and the the words, and then I took for each, I guess, line, was one character and then spelled out the word,

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Unknown
So pretty much that that kind of the idea. So, so to me this exemplifies like once you know what you’re doing, it’s really, really easy to do, that there are two parts to puzzles. And I think this is what makes them really exciting. The first part is looking at what’s there in plain sight and understanding exactly what you want, what you got to do, and then the actual doing it is really straightforward.

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Unknown
And that’s what I kind of want to think about when you think about in terms of teaching, learning.

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Unknown
A lot of the time when we’re working with people, which people know what to do and therefore just doing it is the boring bit, the working out what to do and scoping and then being really surprised that, you know, this isn’t a menu at all.

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Unknown
It’s it’s hidden in plain sight.

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Unknown
but it’s also the kind of knowing you’re right when you’ve got it.

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Unknown
again, I as I said, I’ve done a lot of work in play over the years.

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Unknown
And it’s more recently that I’ve started really theorizing what’s important about playing, what’s important about playing learning. Again, kind of for me, there’s two sides to it. My background was I’m a computer scientist, my background and my background was in digital games. And, I started my PhD, which was about looking at collaborative dividend game based learning.

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Unknown
I’m, I’m went in because I’m a gamer with the view that everyone likes playing games. Therefore, if we can make all games like learning a lot of games, that’ll be really fun, which is very much what people such as Mark Pinsky, who was writing a lot at the time, were saying. I immediately got into focus group with the I think it was eight, mature students, all of which went, oh, we don’t play.

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Unknown
We don’t like games. Computer scientists as well. Actually were too busy to play games. It transpired that they would play games if they thought it was pedagogically the best way to learn. But this kind of assumption that was in literature at the time, that people will play games because it’s better than everything else, just didn’t hold up with busy people who were strategic.

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Unknown
And that’s what kind of got me thinking around, okay, so play is games.

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Unknown
and then

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Unknown
as I learned more and I got more into education and I kind of developed this idea of actually it’s two things. So you’ve got the games at one side. And, you know, the advantage of games is they’re built as constructivist learning environments.

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They have a meaningful aim. Games have evolved,

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to be engaging because games people do them voluntarily.

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Unknown
They’ve just sort of become the, the ways that they keep people engaged as really sophisticated so that the way that you will just be playing a game and you just play for another ten minutes and suddenly it’s three hours later, or that they involve leveling up.

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Unknown
Well, that involves social sort of facilitation and social lubrication.

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Unknown
If you if you start to look at games, play the video games and map them onto a what’s good game, what’s good learning. So kind of James Jay’s work around,

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how what can games tell us about learning literacy?

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Unknown
You get this sort of this is these benefits.

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Unknown
But then if you start to look at what the other side of it, which I think is this, this idea of playfulness, so games being this objective thing that you can look at and you can see it’s a game, playfulness being this very much a state of mind and a kind of willingness to put oneself into the game, to accept the rules of the game, and to just go with the flow in that kind of spirit play.

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Unknown
Related to this is as a I, we, you know, I say if you read one thing about games in play, I love the work of Bernard Suits. He’s a play philosopher, was writing in the 1970s, and he has written a book called The Grasshopper. And it’s just such a lovely. It’s a beautiful little book. Really well-written, really funny, really insightful.

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Unknown
And he has this idea of kind of illusory attitude, and the literary attitude is the willingness to just embrace the rules of play, even though they’re not the most efficient ways of doing things. So he gives the example of golf, and he talks about, well, actually, what’s golf about? It’s about getting a ball into a hole. And if we will, anyway, if you just wants to get the ball in the hole, there’s many, many more efficient ways of doing it than hitting it with a stick

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Unknown
But you do we do it in that way because it’s playful. So for me is when you get the structural

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Unknown
part of games,

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the mindset of playfulness, not mindset, so that the ludic mindset that allows you to have a community of people who all collaborate and play the game. So again,

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Unknown
Bernard de coven has this fantastic idea of play as collaboration.

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Unknown
And then what he says is that when you’re playing with somebody, you are you will colluding with them to keep the game playing, to keep this set of artificial rules because it’s fun.

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Unknown
you can have a space where you feel, you know, trusting where you feel importantly, really safe to fail to try new things because you feel safe to fail. And it’s when you get this overlap then of play, which is the structures of games and the mindset of playfulness that I think is really powerful.

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Unknown
I’ve also I’m very interested in this kind of concept of the magic circle, which I’m going to go into into more detail.

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Unknown
But how when you create this play, you also create this magic circle for learning.

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Unknown
Just to give you some examples, of just so this, this is a photo that was taken quite a long time ago now. But again, I developed with colleagues, called Staying the Course. And this is a board game.

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Unknown
And generally these students were in the first week at university, and none of them ever met each other five minutes before playing this game.

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Unknown
And I just love that they’re so smiley and happy so quickly.

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Unknown
And of course, they’d been the first week and they just want to meet people and they wouldn’t really be taking any of in because none of it was contextualized. And then it wouldn’t it would only be a year down the line when they ran out of money, and they didn’t know how to get finance or,

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Unknown
so this game was, was intended to replace that.

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Unknown
And essentially it’s a lot of quite silly scenarios,

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Unknown
they can then sort of go around the board and they’ll take them through the scenarios. It provides context, it provides silliness. It has kind of what I call play signifiers that as soon as you put

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Unknown
primary colored play board and cards, people know what to do with it and it changes out.

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Unknown
but you can do of things really quickly with, with board games.

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Unknown
the other side of it, it’s this idea of playfulness. And this is sort of anyone that knows me well will get so sick of hearing this example, but I think it’s just such an easy example of how a very easy, playful reframing can completely change things.

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Unknown
So back when I was working at Manchester University, probably about 8 or 9 years ago now, with a research group that was looking at play and play for learning, everybody. And it was super motivated. There were about 12 of us. So we said like, let’s have a, a monthly reading group. We’ve got all these books we need to get through, and we just need to, you know, the meeting, the reading group will motivate us to do that.

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Unknown
the first week everyone had read the book, so. And then the next month, a few people had messaged me the downfall. So that I just having the time to read the book. I won’t come. And then by the third month, it was like half the people wouldn’t be the best in the world. Everybody was just really busy.

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Unknown
So that was the point at which I decided to change the Rules of Reading group, which had previously been you read the book and then you come and talk about book. So we then said reading group is about you read the book or you pretend you’ve read the book. And it wasn’t about find out whether you people really had or not.

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Unknown
That didn’t really matter, because what mattered was that they came to the to the to the talk, and they talked to each other about the book.

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Unknown
I’m pretty sure there was one occasion nobody’d read the book because I read it subsequently. And when we were talking about something else, but it was still it didn’t matter because that wasn’t what it was for.

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Unknown
So it is these very easy sort of reframes that can completely change what happens. What happened with reading Group was that people started just coming to every meeting because you took the pressure of failure off, because it’s not really a failure.

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Unknown
On the other side of that, if you care about the kind of diagram, you can get games of that play and

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Unknown
games that playfulness and playfulness without games.

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Unknown
So, this is a game. Well, it was called chores. I don’t know if anybody’s ever played it. I don’t even know if it still exists. But quite a long time ago, a long, long time ago. Because I’m sure it’s before we had children. Myself and my husband. Well, neither of us like doing the chores, because who does?

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Unknown
But I’m a gamer, and he’s not, and I went, right, okay, I’m getting this. Basically, what you do is you sign up and then you write all the things that need to be done and the allocate points to them. And then when you when you do a chore, you get points for it. And we run it for a month and at the end of the month I got all the points, literally all the points.

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Unknown
And I was really, really shocked because I thought I’d won. And he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ve won. And it was only afterwards of like, oh yeah, okay, that didn’t work.

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Unknown
then we gave up because I realized I’d been hoodwinked by the game. But the point of this is that it’s offering a gamification layer. Some of it’s boring.

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Unknown
And giving somebody points within the washing or the washing up is still not going to make the game fun. And again, there are lots of sort of examples of, of things where the playfulness is taken out of the games of professional sports, potentially, gambling. So you could, you can take one from the other. Equally, it’s possible to be playful, but not in a game.

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Unknown
And, here’s some examples that I like. People who are as soon as apps came out that which map your run, you have code communities, people who are mapping their runs.

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Unknown
Another example is back in the day in the Amazon.

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Unknown
Somebody would write a stupid review, and then somebody else would add to it. So what some of the most famous is the three wolves howling at the moon t shirt, and it’s a rubbish t shirt.

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Unknown
If you go to Amazon, it’s like literally tens of thousands of people going on and saying things like, I prefer the two wolves howling at the moon, or just it’s just become a silly thing.

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Unknown
Like, I saw this chap at the bottom, and I’m not sure if he will have made late to Canada, but to be honest, he’s not even very famous in the UK is chap Paul Ross, who was a much, much more famous older brother called Jonathan Ross.

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Unknown
And for some reason Amazon was selling a quite a large canvas print. But, obviously the good denizens of Amazon decided very much to make a joke out of this. So again, it’s got hundreds of people just eulogizing about this giant canvas print of this very much not a celebrity. So again, lots of examples of playfulness that isn’t necessarily about games.

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Unknown
Right. Time for another puzzle.

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Unknown
So again, we’ve we’ve taken the same sort of idea of it’s nothing to do. So to do with, obviously there’s a surface, but what’s going on here? Now, this one’s slightly different because it does.

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Unknown
I you will need some additional knowledge. So the first one could be worked out without anything. You do need to know something else here, but you can Google. I have no problem with people googling things.

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Unknown
So what you need to know is this. And again, if this was an escape room, you wouldn’t be coming to a cold. There would be a poster on the wall, or there’d be a book, or there’d be some hint.

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Unknown
And then work out how to give you a clue that making it so obvious. But if you Google, NATO alphabet, that might give you the answer.

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Unknown
You know I’ve written it down. I’m guessing. Yes, correct. Well done. Heather. Yay! Do you want to explain it to everyone? Okay, well, first I said nurse, because for some reason, my white uniform just stood out and I was like, well, maybe she’s a, waitress nurse. I don’t know, I had a weird train of thought there. And then you said, the NATO alphabet, the Alpha Bravo, Charlie, Delta Echo.

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Unknown
And then that was a big hint, thank you.

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Unknown
Yeah. So basically hidden in all of those, there is a NATO Alphabet words. If, say, you take the actual alphabet of them, You get “STUNT”

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Unknown
This is different for the first one, because if you don’t know what the NATO alphabet is, you just never going to get it.

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Unknown
And again, when I’ve done this before, sometimes somebody knows it and often, Sierra will be a trigger because it’s quite an unusual word. But if people don’t, you are really stuck. And to me, that’s the sort of analogy between. So like in an escape room, if you’re going to use Braille or Morse or the nature of that, of that, they always give it to you.

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Unknown
Again, when you’re doing online, you can sort of give people hints about where to go for things. But it’s making sure that people have the tools to be able to, to work out. And again, it says this two step, once you know it’s native alphabet and you find the native alphabet and you look at them, it’s easy, but it’s not knowing what you need to do.

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Unknown
So well done. Heather. I hope you’re also so we had the first word was rotate at the second were just stunt. You probably want to not forget those.

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Unknown
Okay. So yeah, when I spoke before, I was talking about the, the overlap between,

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Unknown
playing games and playfulness. So I’m really interested in, this theoretical construct called the Magic Circle.

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Unknown
And this came this was originally sort of posited by a Dutch play theorist called, Holsinger back in the 1950s. But if you go back and read his book, which is called Home Illusions,

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Unknown
He was a man of his time. And it’s a little bit dated and a little bit problematic now, but some of his ideas are, quite good.

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Unknown
But he doesn’t really mention the Magic Circle as a construct. He uses the phrase about six times, but he doesn’t really explain what it is, and it’s almost like he uses it as a proxy. But he’s credited as the person that came up with this idea. It was then picked up in about 2003 by Kate Salen and Eric Zimmermann, who all,

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Unknown
games play theorists, and they sort of use the constructs of the magic circle as a way of saying, when you play a game.

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Unknown
So so he’s using that sort of had it is a, it’s an alternate space that we create, and he has lots of ways of doing it. So he talked about rituals and sort of the he talked about about religious rituals that the way that you might behave in a church or in a synagogue or in a mosque is it follows a sort of almost playful patterns and what is and isn’t acceptable and how the rules are kind of, how people behave

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Unknown
Right. This is about they were to video games, but actually a lot of what they talked about has been extrapolated since then. And the idea being that when you play, you make an, sometimes written, sometimes unwritten contract with the other players, or in the case of the video game, with the person that’s designed the game, that you will abide by the rules of the game.

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Unknown
So when you sit down to play chess and because you can recognize a chessboard and assuming you already know the rules, you, when you sit down to play, you are making a contract that says, I am only going to move my bishops diagonally. I am only going to move my knights in the knights move, because otherwise you’d be cheating.

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Unknown
Now there’s a whole thing about kind of cheating around the magic circle, but the idea is a magic circle is is it produces this space which is separate from the real world. It’s delineated as it’s delineated in space, and it’s delineated in time, that people can move in and out of. So you might have somebody watching who’s in the magic circle and other people who are kind of separated.

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Unknown
You see this a lot with children playing. I remember I got two girls who are now very. Yeah, almost adults. But when, when, when they were very little, they were playing some sort of intricate game with dolls, you know, the way the children do, they’re absolutely immersed. I can’t remember exactly what they were doing, but I went up and they said, oh, is is your doll okay?

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Unknown
And and they went “Mummy, it’s a doll, it’s fine.” Because I wasn’t in their magic circle, but they were in their own sort of play space. And it’s how you create these spaces and what’s for me. So I write a lot about the magic circle of learning, because I think actually what we’re really bad at doing is creating those safe spaces, certain in the UK and expecting Canada to we as soon as kids get to be about five, they start being tested at school.

00:21:34:12 – 00:21:48:03
Unknown
So you go through this regimen of testing pressure, stress, memorizing, regurgitating stuff, testing and failures. Bad always constructed as bad. So so essentially we get them coming to universities and

00:21:48:03 – 00:22:03:05
Unknown
if they’ve been lucky, they’ve basically been hothouse through the exams. They can memorize things for the exams, but they don’t know how to think for themselves, and they don’t know the idea of actually that there might not be a right answer, or there might be a problem that you don’t necessarily have an answer to, or, you know, the problem is.

00:22:03:05 – 00:22:12:08
Unknown
Yeah. So it’s that kind of very moving and it’s absolutely the fault of our of our states too. Well, our school system that prioritizes

00:22:12:08 – 00:22:25:06
Unknown
knowledge. For example, my eldest daughter is currently sitting her GCSE is here. She’s 16. So these are all your not your big big exams for university. But so the next set and she gets told off because she has not used the right wording to answer a question.

00:22:25:08 – 00:22:30:03
Unknown
Not that she’s got the question wrong or misunderstood the question, but she hasn’t used the right form of words

00:22:30:03 – 00:22:41:11
Unknown
to answer the same thing. I think the world is. Is that a sensible way? She’s paraphrased that she used her I was surely that’s better. But she’s been marked off, things like that.

00:22:41:11 – 00:22:46:09
Unknown
So one thing that I’m really keen on doing in higher education is saying, well, how do we bring back these safe spaces?

00:22:46:09 – 00:22:49:08
Unknown
And I think escape rooms are really good examples doing that.

00:22:49:08 – 00:22:57:05
Unknown
So this sort of theorization comes to a paper that I wrote fairly recently, which is about unpicking the magic circle, which I’ve been talking about a lot.

00:22:57:05 – 00:23:06:10
Unknown
looking for what? Where’s the evidence around this and what what really matters now? Again, I talked about the Google Play project, which I will talk about the end.

00:23:06:10 – 00:23:24:07
Unknown
But what what that project is trying to do is to provide sort of concrete evidence that these things do happen when we play. So kind of in terms of the theorization, if we think of it as this juxtaposition of games on one side, cleverness on the other side, as I said before, games because they are designed in such a way that they have clear goals, clear rules.

00:23:24:08 – 00:23:34:10
Unknown
and a purpose. The idea of the being constructivist meaningful is almost hard baked in because you have an end goal that makes it meaningful and things that people want to do.

00:23:34:10 – 00:23:41:13
Unknown
in a way that often the things that we have students doing and or particularly school students doing, it’s not very meaningful.

00:23:41:13 – 00:24:09:01
Unknown
My daughter has to memorize 15 poems. It’s like, when is she ever going to have to memorize 15 poems in real life? It’s ridiculous. Why are we asking students to do these stupid things? Alongside that is this idea of intrinsic motivation. So as I said, games are have evolved, to be in the sweet spot. So there’s, I don’t know if anybody’s familiar with chips in high flow theory, which I get though, you know, you’ve made it is the games researcher when you can pronounce his name.

00:24:09:02 – 00:24:31:09
Unknown
And essentially what he does is he maps difficulty on one axis against the challenge on the other axis, and basically says that whilst you’re doing an activity that stays in the sort of sweet spot between difficulty and challenge. So as your skills go up, the challenge goes up and and so you stay in this flow channel. So this was mapped by Jessie Schell on to thinking about video games and how video games work.

00:24:31:10 – 00:24:55:15
Unknown
And if you’re a gamer, this sort of pattern when I say it will go, oh, why, yes, of course, because basically what happens is you start very easily. There’s a I mean, there are some pixels like suicide, you know, it’s not very easy and as quick by and you make some quick wins and then very rapidly the game starts ramp up and it ramps up, and then suddenly it gets exponentially hard when you meet a boss level, then you find that boss level.

00:24:56:02 – 00:25:06:04
Unknown
Then it gets easier again for a little bit, and then it ramps up and ramps up. You have this kind of continuing pattern which has been shown to keep people playing because you just want to beat the boss, and then it gets easy.

00:25:06:04 – 00:25:15:04
Unknown
So it’s always this intrinsic kind of motivation of keeping you in that sort of sweet spot in a way that often what we’re teaching really doesn’t manage to do.

00:25:15:05 – 00:25:29:11
Unknown
And on the other side of playfulness. So there’s this idea of this illusory community, this goes back, this is a collaboration. I was talking about that people are playing because they want to play. They are willing to enter into the spirit of play.

00:25:29:11 – 00:25:35:08
Unknown
Even if you’re competitive, you are still colluding to play together and to follow the rules.

00:25:35:09 – 00:25:54:15
Unknown
But even more so for for collaborative games, things like escape rooms. The idea of having this community around you, it’s not something that can just be built up. It just doesn’t appear. I mean, there are examples of, you know, you get students in a room, they start playing a game, they will build up a sort of very high level, this free community by being in that moment.

00:25:55:03 – 00:26:13:06
Unknown
But but it’s something that would need to propagate over and over over a longer period of time. But it is that sort of willingness to be in this playful space together. Alongside of this is this idea of imaginative freedom. So a willingness because you’re, you’re in a safe space and you can try things that you wouldn’t normally try.

00:26:13:06 – 00:26:41:01
Unknown
So, for example, and role play is one of the common examples of this. So being in a space where you can make decisions, you can play out scenarios, you can see what it’s like to be somebody that you’re not. Because you ask a in a safe space, it then means that you actually are able to take risks, which you wouldn’t necessarily normally take, step out of your comfort zone, try things, because at the heart of this and this is that I’m really interested in is this idea of a failure mindset.

00:26:41:02 – 00:26:46:08
Unknown
And this kind of comes to the gaming side that games are designed so that you can fail, because if you

00:26:46:08 – 00:26:50:04
Unknown
can’t fail at the game, there’s no jeopardy, there’s no fun, there’s no,

00:26:50:04 – 00:26:58:13
Unknown
it’s kind of there’s no point to it because the only point of the game is to either beat the game will beat the system will beat somebody else.

00:26:59:01 – 00:27:16:02
Unknown
So if you if you have that system, there must always be a point at which failure is always an option. And again, Thomas Malone back in the 80s, that’s really nice work about what people’s P keeps people engaged in games. And it’s a combination of knowing that you can fail, but believing you can achieve,

00:27:16:02 – 00:27:19:14
Unknown
if you have a game where you can’t fail, it will just be really boring.

00:27:20:00 – 00:27:34:11
Unknown
It takes you right down into the what? What’s the point is your your skills are way higher than the challenge. Other. The other side of it is playfulness gives us the kind of skills and resources we need to manage failure when it happens. So it’s about having the community. It’s about having,

00:27:34:11 – 00:27:37:09
Unknown
understand that failure can be progressive.

00:27:37:10 – 00:27:52:02
Unknown
And I think for me, it’s one thing that play can do. It’s this idea of progressive failure and how we change the mindset from failure being a really bad thing to failure being, oh, well, okay. It’s just that it’s a it’s an opportunity to learn something. And about how we reconstruct that.

00:27:52:02 – 00:27:53:12
Unknown
This was taken at a conference.

00:27:53:12 – 00:27:59:12
Unknown
this sort of, to me, reminds me of the kind of boundaries and inclusivity of play,

00:27:59:12 – 00:28:13:08
Unknown
because it is also quite easy around playfulness to be quite exclusive. So we run a conference every year, been known for ten years this summer called Play for learning, and it’s a whole mixture of people who play in different ways.

00:28:13:10 – 00:28:38:11
Unknown
And Mathias, who’s that at the front was one point decided he was going to do some flocking. And flocking involves just kind of walking around, and doing things and other people following you and doing these things. And every so often someone else would go to the front. And it was just a sort of wonderful outpouring of spontaneous, spontaneous joy and delight, in a way that terrified me.

00:28:38:12 – 00:28:41:07
Unknown
And that’s why I’m taking photos. Not part of locking.

00:28:41:07 – 00:28:55:07
Unknown
me, it was like, why would I do that? That’s really freaky weird. And a but everyone’s got their that’s freaking weird point. So I’ve, I’ve got a friend who, I love karaoke. For him, karaoke is his freaky, weird play space. He won’t do that.

00:28:55:07 – 00:29:15:06
Unknown
I’ve got another friend who hates to play Dungeons Dragons, and it’s that acknowledgment that people play in different ways, and that what you think is perfectly normal and fine. Other people won’t necessarily feel like that. So I have seen this with escape rooms before where where people just go, I don’t want to be in a room with four people, just don’t want to do it.

00:29:15:10 – 00:29:26:03
Unknown
And so I think the heart of reason that we’re doing around this is thinking about, well, how are we being as inclusive as we can be and recognizing that people do play in different ways.

00:29:26:03 – 00:29:31:11
Unknown
I think the thing about failure is really important. I think for me, failure in escape rooms is really important.

00:29:31:11 – 00:29:47:04
Unknown
this ability both to the failing is normalized and failing is resilience is built. And having those two and providing those opportunities to fail in ways that don’t matter. So the kind of best allegory I can think of this is I was a big gamer back in the day.

00:29:47:05 – 00:29:50:15
Unknown
I got a spectrum in the 80s, and I used to love spectrum games.

00:29:50:15 – 00:30:00:08
Unknown
But all the I, you know, I really loved adventure games, but all the adventure games, they were a hard but the most frustrating thing was you’d get two thirds of the way through.

00:30:00:09 – 00:30:17:05
Unknown
And bearing in mind that you’d have to get a tape recorder to load the thing in the first place, and halfway through someone would go that they wanted to watch something on the telly, and then you’d have to give the telly back because you compute what was the tally? But you’d get two thirds way through. Finally, make a wrong move and be set right back at the beginning.

00:30:17:06 – 00:30:27:09
Unknown
And it was almost like the amount of the penalty for making choices was, just wasn’t commensurate with what happened.

00:30:27:09 – 00:30:28:01
Unknown
I

00:30:28:01 – 00:30:39:06
Unknown
basically just got really frustrated because you were scared to try anything new because as soon as you tried something new, they put you right back at the beginning. So I don’t think I, I completed a single

00:30:39:06 – 00:30:41:03
Unknown
adventure game back in the 80s.

00:30:41:04 – 00:30:55:05
Unknown
And then in 1990, this game came out and, and yeah, anyone who knows me and I talks about this when I was doing my talk on on the Wednesday, this is against Monkey Island. It was it’s really slow to play now.

00:30:55:05 – 00:31:00:11
Unknown
But at the time it was an absolute game changer simply because you couldn’t really fail.

00:31:00:11 – 00:31:18:02
Unknown
You, rather than throwing you back, it just let you try and you could try lots of things. And the only actually two ways you can fail. This is one of them. And this is involves taking a main character who is Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate, taking him down into the sea. And you literally stay there for an hour, so.

00:31:18:02 – 00:31:35:14
Unknown
And then after an hour, it’s like you’ve drowned. And that’s in real time. Not even in game time. I don’t know how anyone found out that was a thing, but it was just such a game changer. From. Here’s something that I’m never going to finish, because it just keep going back to getting it back to getting something that do you know, what if I do?

00:31:35:15 – 00:31:56:03
Unknown
If I get it wrong, I might have something funny, might happen, or it’ll just tell me it’s wrong and to try something else. And that is such a change in mindset both. But in gaming terms, but also in terms of why are we not teaching like this? Why is curriculum not designed like this? Because it’s not about learning something for one moment.

00:31:56:03 – 00:32:01:03
Unknown
It’s about getting to the point where you’re able to do something and you’ve worked out how to do it.

00:32:01:03 – 00:32:08:04
Unknown
But to me, that has a whole thing about this is this is how we can manage failure and make it much, much more fun.

00:32:08:04 – 00:32:15:10
Unknown
It’s still possible to fail is possible. Not complete. But, it’s not boring and frustrating in the process.

00:32:15:10 – 00:32:27:02
Unknown
I’m going to give you this is the third puzzle. And then again, this is again taking a slightly different way of thinking. Again, you will need to do some looking up on the internet. It does use something else.

00:32:27:13 – 00:32:38:07
Unknown
Well done. Sherry. Nice. So this. This is more complicated because you’ve actually got to do about three different things. Sherry, do you want to talk us through it?

00:32:38:07 – 00:32:40:08
Unknown
I recognize it is Braille.

00:32:40:08 – 00:32:47:02
Unknown
So, the letters are VOTE, but they’re not in order, so,

00:32:47:02 – 00:32:49:09
Unknown
I just rearranged the letters,

00:32:49:09 – 00:32:56:02
Unknown
because this would be the first letter, and then this one is two, and then this is three, and then this is the fourth letter.

00:32:56:02 – 00:33:04:00
Unknown
But honestly, I didn’t even look at the top. I just looked at the letters. And then I saw the word vote. Oh, so you could have had veto

00:33:04:00 – 00:33:05:12
Unknown
Yeah I guess. Yeah. One.

00:33:05:12 – 00:33:13:02
Unknown
So this is sort of an example of a puzzle that’s got multi-layered thinking. So you first of all that was recognized as a code.

00:33:13:04 – 00:33:33:10
Unknown
And then it’s nothing to do with dominoes. You’ve got to recognize what code it is to you’ve got to recognize it’s Braille. And again if you actually some way like an escape room, there would be clues that would you would actually have to access the Braille is not going to make you ever know that. But then they do a lot of these kind of sorting puzzles of how do you know what order to put it to?

00:33:33:14 – 00:33:42:01
Unknown
And again, if you can tie that in with something like the dominoes. So if you put it in the order that the dominoes tell you to, you get you get the word vote.

00:33:42:01 – 00:33:45:02
Unknown
One of the again, one of the very first escape rooms that I did,

00:33:45:02 – 00:33:45:07
Unknown
I

00:33:45:07 – 00:33:49:10
Unknown
did is my frend Nancy who’s, this amazing computer scientist.

00:33:49:12 – 00:33:54:11
Unknown
And we were in one of the back rooms. And then on the wall there was a UV lamp,

00:33:54:11 – 00:33:58:06
Unknown
a newbie torch, and there was just loads and loads of Ascii,

00:33:58:06 – 00:34:08:08
Unknown
and, well, binary. And she went, oh, that’s definitely Ascii. And like, in her head was was working out because she knew and of course it wasn’t Ascii because there was no Ascii codebook.

00:34:08:10 – 00:34:21:15
Unknown
And then she went, this isn’t this is not right. It’s not proper Ascii. And it’s like, no, it’s complete red herring. Some of it put some lots of zeros and ones on the wall. But I think there’s always this thing when you come in and you know a little bit about something and you’re trying to find these codes and it,

00:34:21:15 – 00:34:24:03
Unknown
yeah, you can just send you complete for six.

00:34:24:04 – 00:34:39:10
Unknown
I think that’s a really good point, Heather, about the kind of your frame of reference. And this is what escape rooms are good. And this is when you’re trying to get a puzzle. If you can get a puzzle that completely puts people in the wrong direction. So I do a lot of cryptic crosswords and, I like cryptic crosswords.

00:34:39:10 – 00:35:01:15
Unknown
It’s my, my guilty pleasure. And a lot of that is about coming up with a surface that means one thing and sends people in completely the wrong direction. So I think trying to find puzzles where you’re hiding both the code and the order in something that looks like something completely else, that it’s just. But you know, when you’ve got it right.

00:35:02:00 – 00:35:20:14
Unknown
And I think that’s the other thing with puzzles is, is that it’s that knowing. And again, I do a lot of escape rooms and quite often you’ll know the answer is a three digit code, but you’ll have ten three digit logs and you don’t know which one goes where. And it just it’s like not satisfying because you’re not getting that feedback because because of what, you know.

00:35:20:14 – 00:35:35:09
Unknown
one site. So I did my first escape room in 2014. And then from that point on, I was absolutely desperate to go, what can I do? I want to do a funded project with this, and this project kind of almost just wrote itself.

00:35:35:10 – 00:35:49:15
Unknown
I was mentoring, a colleague who was a head teacher at one of our local schools in Manchester. We were we were writing a paper about maths, but we got a bit bored about that. And then we go on to talk about games. And he was saying, we’ve got like all this enrichment time for our sixth formers.

00:35:49:15 – 00:35:52:06
Unknown
So they would be 17, 18 years old.

00:35:52:06 – 00:36:09:10
Unknown
he was just like, I don’t know what to do with them because they’re all stressed and I want to do something that’s meaningful. That kind of gives some external skills. And around that time, I’d just been funded on a project called the Learning Games Project, which was a new network which was basically just small pots of money to invest in small projects.

00:36:09:11 – 00:36:17:10
Unknown
And so I had a bit of money and I was going, I need a project, and I want to do something with escape games. And over a cup of tea we were like, well, why don’t

00:36:17:10 – 00:36:26:08
Unknown
We get the students to build escape games during their enrichment week and then they can, we’ve got a conference coming up so they can actually run the games at the conference.

00:36:26:08 – 00:36:29:09
Unknown
and that’s what we did. So essentially it was a model where,

00:36:29:09 – 00:36:44:07
Unknown
we, I think we had 12 students in the first year, and we put them into three groups, and they started off with that. I’ve got this is sort of an extrapolate, value based learning idea. The initiation phase. So we took them out. We’ve got them to play escape games together.

00:36:44:08 – 00:37:04:09
Unknown
And then I ran a day long course about how you design in the skate game and sort things. You got to be thinking about. Then over the first group that did it, they did it in fortnight. So we had this very rapid prototyping of, develop a puzzle, developed, test it. And the great thing about any sort of game design is you get it wrong first time.

00:37:04:09 – 00:37:13:08
Unknown
It’s just intrinsic in nature game design. I teach game design here and no matter how many times I tell my students that you won’t get it right first time, get someone to test it.

00:37:13:08 – 00:37:20:08
Unknown
So it’s a but this, this cycle of test, fail, reflect, revise, absolutely hard baked into development.

00:37:20:09 – 00:37:25:11
Unknown
And again and it works in a number of levels. So there’s the kind of development in terms of,

00:37:25:11 – 00:37:37:03
Unknown
the initial puzzles development is the theme, putting it all together. And then at the end this presentation and we were really keen that it wasn’t going to be marked, and it wasn’t to be stressful, but we wanted it to be meaningful.

00:37:37:05 – 00:37:43:02
Unknown
So at the conference, we actually ran, we had three groups run, three live escape rooms. So we got

00:37:43:02 – 00:37:51:14
Unknown
classrooms, they had small meeting rooms, and they actually had to build it. So they had to deal with the communication themselves. They had to book people. And that’s basically curating the whole experience.

00:37:51:14 – 00:38:01:05
Unknown
But they weren’t marked on it. And for the students, I mean, we, I did some research around that the whole time and, they were so into it, it was incredible.

00:38:01:05 – 00:38:24:09
Unknown
They they found it really difficult the first time we gave them feedback because they, they just didn’t know how to take feedback. That wasn’t like, oh, you’ve got this, Mark. They found it really difficult not to be marked, but also they found it difficult to to do get into the cycle of testing, failing, improving. I mean, they nailed it by the end of the second week, and it was just like, okay, this is about making stuff better.

00:38:24:09 – 00:38:27:11
Unknown
It’s not about that being something that comes at the end of it.

00:38:27:11 – 00:38:34:05
Unknown
And because we’ve basically said, well, you’ve got to test it with these different groups at these different times, and you’ve got to change it in between.

00:38:34:05 – 00:38:45:08
Unknown
They did it to test it with their teachers, and that was the most Eye-Opening thing. So the unexpected consequence for me was that they loved having something they produced that their teachers couldn’t do.

00:38:45:09 – 00:38:59:02
Unknown
So watching their teachers struggle with the puzzles that they created in terms of confidence, in terms of them going, oh, okay, it’s this level playing field. Teachers are just human beings too. They knew, it was really powerful.

00:38:59:02 – 00:39:20:07
Unknown
So Rachel is, my PhD student, and she works a lot with designing escape rooms for, for teaching. So what I did was around learning through designing escape rooms. And hers was around, teaching, using me to teach. But actually, the same model works for both, because if you’re student learning and in escape rooms, you basically have you you initiation.

00:39:20:07 – 00:39:43:04
Unknown
You’re moving into the magic circle. You’re told what the story is told, what the aims are, And then in that escape room, you have this repeated, okay, here’s here’s the thing. I’m gonna test my supposition. I’m going to fail. I’m going to reflect when to revise. I mean, it’s essentially a reflective learning cycle. It’s not a massively original, but it’s the fact that you’ve got failure hard baked in there, and then you will either solve or not solve the escape room.

00:39:43:04 – 00:39:50:01
Unknown
So the presentation is either the here’s the thing that I made or it’s yes, we get out. Hey, isn’t that good?

00:39:50:01 – 00:40:00:00
Unknown
I think to me it’s the fact that it’s not assessed and but it’s still the ending is meaningful. Whether that’s getting out of whichever room you’re in, whether it’s presenting something in a real life context.

00:40:00:00 – 00:40:16:06
Unknown
that’s kind of why I’m, I’m pretty excited about escape rooms and the potential of them, a room which is about time to see what you guys can escape. So you should have three words. So this bit’s hard. I’m not gonna lie. And you probably need to work together to kind of work out what’s going on.

00:40:16:07 – 00:40:22:15
Unknown
So there’s loads of stuff going on. You need to get your three words

00:40:22:15 – 00:40:23:12
Unknown
and,

00:40:23:12 – 00:40:25:01
Unknown
work out what to do with them.

00:40:27:07 – 00:40:51:07
Unknown
To us, inside of actually doing a project right now, which is in which we’ve been working with, escape room Games Masters to try and work out when to intervene. Because generally, people intervene too early. So I’m trying not desperately not to intervene too early, but to let people grapple for a little bit.

00:40:52:00 – 00:41:04:06
Unknown
And this is where I’m going. This might be a cultural thing because this is big in the UK. In the US that might. I think it’s probably I think in Canada. But if it’s not. Yeah. Good question. What’s the first symbol.

00:41:04:06 – 00:41:07:08
Unknown
It’s an app, okay? It’s an app. There you go.

00:41:07:09 – 00:41:11:13
Unknown
Yeah, but again, it could well be that it’s not a big deal where you guys are.

00:41:11:13 – 00:41:14:04
Unknown
it’s a website called WhatThreeWords.

00:41:14:04 – 00:41:32:04
Unknown
And it allows you to tell what they reference any meta anywhere in the world based on three words. Hey that again please to every the base that they’ve mapped, every square of the globe. And each one has a unique three word identifier.

00:41:32:06 – 00:41:42:04
Unknown
And so if you go to the website and put in the three words or any three words, or you find any square, it’ll tell you where you are.

00:41:43:15 – 00:41:49:09
Unknown
So if you go to the website. So it’s WhatThreeWords, You should be able to find a place.

00:41:49:09 – 00:41:54:03
Unknown
So this is actually a place one of my friends lives. I went to quite a lot growing up.

00:41:54:03 – 00:42:12:06
Unknown
Go with. It’s pronounced spina, spelt talk. And how, particularly interesting, because it’s the only place name in the UK that it says Hill three ways being a tour, a pen, and how. But there’s something else you need to do with it.

00:42:12:08 – 00:42:13:15
Unknown
So you’ve got your word.

00:42:13:15 – 00:42:25:09
Unknown
Oh, I rearranged, that’s not it. How to open? No, no. Well, the so the word, the place you get to.

00:42:25:09 – 00:42:35:05
Unknown
So if you, if you go to what, three words and you put in. Yeah. The them in the correct corner, you get to this little place called Japan right.

00:42:35:06 – 00:42:46:13
Unknown
But then you need to do something else with spina like not rearrange the letters though. Nope, nope. It’s what I want to do. That’s the problem.

00:42:47:00 – 00:43:18:13
Unknown
It says raise your hand in the teams meeting. Think this is very, Yeah. Well done. So said you want to talk everyone through what you did. Oops. Sorry. Yeah, sure. I, I really like all the different steps, and I think, you know, we were all kind of quietly navigating around and, you know, what a what a neat activity to kind of open up the mikes and hear how different people or walk talking it through, right, what they’re doing.

00:43:18:13 – 00:43:43:09
Unknown
But, really neat. I really like that. The word what, three words site. So, I just kind of plunked in the three words there and, that’s that location that popped up. So that was a really neat kind of tool there. And then I just plugged that, the name of that location into the URL at the bottom.

00:43:43:11 – 00:44:08:03
Unknown
But, lots of lots of neat steps. And, you know, I think breaking them into little groups where everyone can talk it through is just a really neat way to kind of just learn how to approach puzzles from different directions and sides. And so it’s a really neat, any project there, it’s to me, that’s when I did the first escape room.

00:44:08:04 – 00:44:27:12
Unknown
And I mean, these are people I knew quite well, but we’ve never done puzzles together. And it turned out that Simon was just a wizard. Physical puzzles. He could just get boxes and, do them. And that Katie could do all the puzzles. And I think I was the one going around telling everyone else what to do, but we all kind of naturally fell into these roles, in a way that was just fun.

00:44:27:12 – 00:44:32:01
Unknown
And, you know, you get these sort of teamwork things that,

00:44:32:01 – 00:44:35:01
Unknown
but you get people to have puzzles and they,

00:44:35:01 – 00:44:42:08
Unknown
and there’s a kind of meaning and a purpose to it, and it just sort of changes the whole side of it. So the point of this one,

00:44:42:08 – 00:44:57:05
Unknown
the point of this particular one was it was meant to be so difficult because you’ve got you’ve basically got to work out that there’s the legs which somebody’s got, I think have or somebody got really, really quickly.

00:44:57:05 – 00:45:15:05
Unknown
Jerry, I think it was I’ve never seen anyone get that so quickly. I managed to relate the number of legs to the number of letters because that’s that’s kind of cognitive link. Then you’ve got to work out that it’s this program called what, three words, which again, if nobody’s heard of it doesn’t work. But then you’ve got to put that in.

00:45:15:05 – 00:45:27:15
Unknown
Then you’ve got to work out that it’s the aural, you know, there’s lots and lots of steps there. And it’s really hard to do it without talking to each other. So kind of what happened here is it sort of forces people to have to start to have that interaction either. What’s your question?

00:45:27:15 – 00:45:33:09
Unknown
it’s it’s I’ve done an escape room and I overthink everything in the escape room.

00:45:33:09 – 00:46:01:11
Unknown
And I don’t see the simple and and that’s frustrating. Like I know that. But that’s kind of how I think and learn. But how my question is. So if you’ve got someone like who really, struggles with that and struggles to see any kind of patterns, I guess my question is, how do we bring them into the into the game of it and make it safe enough, especially online, you know, because there are the shy ones that would just be like, I’m hopeless at this.

00:46:01:11 – 00:46:05:08
Unknown
And if you said about that initial engagement that first,

00:46:05:08 – 00:46:21:15
Unknown
just I think it’s that everybody will have a thing and it’s just making it varied enough that everybody will. So I’ve got a friend that I do escape rooms with, and his thing is he will randomly press stuff or he’ll see things. He’ll do very little for most, but he’ll just he’ll be the one that makes some weird.

00:46:21:15 – 00:46:41:01
Unknown
Like, we wouldn’t have Harry Potter one, and he was the only third person thought to press the end of the one one to a button. Nobody else. And it’s so it’s almost like just the being enough in there of different code, different different types of puzzles and activities, because they’ll be somebody who can do a jigsaw really easily.

00:46:41:01 – 00:47:00:05
Unknown
So you putting some easy stuff in and then you’re putting some stuff in that is, is physical if you can. Again, it’s, it’s more difficult. But but I think it’s that trying some people will get codes and but I’ve been in escape room for it’s all codes and that just gets boring. I think again it’s about that kind of the, the two parts to it.

00:47:00:06 – 00:47:24:00
Unknown
So for some people will be able to solve the puzzle if they know what they’re doing. So, you know, if I, if I said, once you explain it, the steps are really easy. But the kind of multiple steps of different cognitive types, I think that I think it’s the making sure there’s this there’s easy stuff in there, but whatever you think is easy, there’ll be somebody doesn’t get it.

00:47:24:04 – 00:47:40:15
Unknown
And I think overthinking is terrible. The group that I go with, because we do a lot of puzzles, we get stuck when we’re overthinking it. And then we discovered that we we come up with a six stage process, and all we have to do is press three. But that’s kind of I think having being able to

00:47:40:15 – 00:47:49:07
Unknown
kind of talk about it as a group and to force people to talk, because that’s when you suddenly start to get, oh, right.

00:47:49:08 – 00:48:12:07
Unknown
So the work that we’ve been doing with the Escape room, which is about how they, how they give clues and hints and kind of key people in the game, and they said the first hint they give is they will get somebody to object the hint over the walkie talkie, whatever. And they said 99% in time. By the time we’ve done that, either they’d have solved it while they were talking or somebody else was in the room who was doing something else and not communicating, well, they’re going, oh, I can do that.

00:48:12:08 – 00:48:20:06
Unknown
And that’s the that’s the most common hint they give. So I think it’s an interesting thing. It’s it’s interesting because,

00:48:20:06 – 00:48:24:09
Unknown
I think, yeah, the communication and the way you talk to people and,

00:48:24:09 – 00:48:51:08
Unknown
and making it maybe different levels or geared towards activities that the people like to do, like my mum loves doing Sudoku. So if there was a Sudoku part of an escape room, she might be more involved. I think there’s a whole bit about the confidence, and I don’t think that being academic is actually helpful in the escape room, because there’s a the cleverest people I know well must be overthink things.

00:48:51:08 – 00:49:13:01
Unknown
and it’s getting that message across that there’s, there’s loads of different ways to be smart and, and what I like about this is it gives everybody a chance. And it’s often the people who don’t think once they get the confidence, oh, actually I can see this, but but yeah, I think it’s how you foster that confidence in how you, you make sure that the people that think they’re going to be good at it don’t hog everything.

00:49:13:02 – 00:49:32:09
Unknown
But again, in a physical space that’s really nice because you can’t physically be everywhere at once. And it is it’s the how do the communication. But also think your point about your mum’s are in this one because not everyone likes playing games. And I guarantee if I do session that’s playful, there’ll be 1 or 2 people that just go, I don’t want do this.

00:49:32:10 – 00:49:50:05
Unknown
And sometimes it’s like, well, you know, sometimes you just have to do stuff you don’t want to do. But also it’s kind of anything that we design or we think about, well, what about the person doesn’t want to do it? And if it’s something they have to do as part of the course, is there a spectator role or an observer role or something that they can be doing that doesn’t necessarily.

00:49:50:06 – 00:49:55:04
Unknown
It comes about the inclusivity part that not everybody plays in the same way.

00:49:55:04 – 00:49:59:02
Unknown
Yeah. So, when we were talking to that kind of process for.

00:49:59:06 – 00:50:04:14
Unknown
What does it look like if I’m working with students or anybody in terms of thinking about designing?

00:50:04:14 – 00:50:11:12
Unknown
I tend most of the work that I’ve done have been for in-person students, and it’s been about students designing for context.

00:50:12:01 – 00:50:45:09
Unknown
But it’s really this is why I say is basically work through this, different professional people, professional skate rooms have a whole way of different things to do. These are the sort of key things to think about. I found that getting them to agree a theme early on allows them to really focus on no escape room, that this is not necessarily how it’s done fashionably, but it’s the once they decide it’s going to be in a psychiatric ward, or it’s going to be zombies, or it’s going to be whatever, they can really start to playing, imagine it.

00:50:45:10 – 00:51:04:01
Unknown
And then it will be a case of thinking through again. People have a really will try and put too many puzzles in because the the we’ve you’ve written the puzzle. It’s obviously easy to solve. It’s only when you start testing it you realize how hard it is. So essentially I’d get into an initial plan and think about the different ways that you can have this game.

00:51:04:01 – 00:51:21:06
Unknown
So you can have linear puzzles, which is great, but difficult for people in the room. There’s going to be people sitting twiddling the thumbs. So again, I would recommend doing something which is like a very basic for puzzles. And then one meter puzzle and to start with something like that, because then you can have different people doing different things.

00:51:21:10 – 00:51:51:11
Unknown
And also that point to be even just starting through, we need a physical puzzle, we need an easy puzzle. We need a puzzle that’s based on the code we need. So to have that that structure at a very basic level, then what we do is we say, say there’s four people, there’s four puzzles, go puzzle each. And then test that puzzle with everybody else because that introduces them to testing things, getting feedback, but in a really safe space because it’s only the people that are in that group, and they’ll all immediately discover that the other three people are solving a complete different way,

00:51:51:11 – 00:52:10:15
Unknown
So so you sort of using that refinement process, you would end up with sort of say, four key puzzles. Then you would go into a kind of a paper prototyping phase. So again, we did have I think part of the joy of a physical escape room is, is the logs in the boxes, but we wouldn’t buy them until they do something.

00:52:11:01 – 00:52:30:13
Unknown
So, I mean, students had, I think about 50 pound, budget per team. But again, if we just bought all that first, then they’re going to start creating the puzzles based on what they’ve got rather than going, what what do we need? So we get them to do paper prototyping first, which is essentially rather than giving them the actual padlock, those envelopes and stickers and things like that.

00:52:30:15 – 00:52:47:14
Unknown
And we’ll start by paper prototyping the whole room. And then once that’s done, then we would give them a little bit of budget so they can do scene setting. And and I mean, some of the, particularly the school, kids that we were working with, there was, there was somebody actually into electronics. So the photo that showed you how to think of Hector’s box.

00:52:48:02 – 00:53:13:00
Unknown
So they actually produced this electronic box that if you put a wire in one side and the outside, it opened and they would just super creating. So the and then they’ll test them until they can two weeks until and then kind of get the final room. But it’s almost like we had to hard to tell them they have to do these cycle because they don’t want to, they don’t want to let other people see what they’ve been doing particularly.

00:53:13:03 – 00:53:41:01
Unknown
And we added in this sort of individual puzzle phase, just to get them to do it earlier on, because we’d get them to go. The problem is that people get most invested in a great puzzle, and therefore they’re trying to tweak it rather than going, right, you know, this bit doesn’t work, that a bit doesn’t work. But I found that that as a kind of process, again, we’ve, we’ve done it with some the first year we run it in two weeks, the second year we run in a week, which wasn’t quite long enough.

00:53:41:02 – 00:54:12:15
Unknown
But it was fine. Then the third year we we, we made it much larger. We had 40 students. We had, say eight different escape rooms. We ran it over six months, but only once a week. And that was actually because it was then, a much wider ability group of students, and certainly the weaker students found the feedback and getting they were much, much more challenged with, this kind of idea of prototyping and testing, which is, again, I think why we moved it subsequently to just start that right at the beginning.

00:54:13:09 – 00:54:36:01
Unknown
So kind things to think about that getting the room plan early and having a visual plan of where everything, you know, how will the puzzle stay. And once you’ve got the theme, it’s almost like the puzzles can just keeping them within the theme. So there’s one thing you did just brilliant. It was at the Children’s Hospital, but every puzzle would not have worked in a different setting, so I think that was really nice.

00:54:36:01 – 00:54:59:09
Unknown
They’ve got the theme first and so that the things like they’ll get well soon, clothes are puzzles within them. But again, having that, that plan of what’s the room like? How do the puzzles work? So again, it’s that kind of balance of types and difficulties that’s really important. Both. But again, the kind of curve of starting off, giving them a really quick win at the beginning, and then sort of ramping up as you go through the game.

00:54:59:09 – 00:55:08:11
Unknown
So again, that there’s different types of thinking, very much physical, different different types of locks. You got your physical, you got your mechanical, you got your electronic.

00:55:09:00 – 00:55:33:00
Unknown
How you do your communication. I think this is really important. This ties in with the theme. And in the first year that we did it, we gave them GoPros so they could see in the room, and they would be watching and then they could communicate. They did it with GoPros and walkie talkies. But again, one of the groups decided that they actually wanted to have I can’t remember what the theme was, but they were just going to put I think it was a prison guard, and the prison guard was just going to sit in the room with them.

00:55:33:02 – 00:55:42:07
Unknown
So it doesn’t there needs to be some kind of option for communicating with the outside. But it doesn’t need to be super complicated. But they do need to think about that.

00:55:42:10 – 00:55:59:14
Unknown
So the and this, this links that the challenge management and the how you provide the clues and the hints and how you do that without breaking the fourth wall, because one of the worst escape rooms I’ve ever been to. Every time. Yes, I had somebody walk in and give it to you and it’s like, well, that’s not the story.

00:55:59:15 – 00:56:05:00
Unknown
So it’s how was I? I’ve seen some great stuff with somebody on a walkie talkie pretending to be part of a heist team.

00:56:05:00 – 00:56:26:04
Unknown
And again, some of the research that I’m doing now is about how you how you make clues because it’s about making it fun, but but not giving clues to early and knowing this difference between grappling and struggling and whether you almost got to the point that you’ve got this sort of metaphor of a ladder of clues from articulating to actually going in and solving it for them.

00:56:26:04 – 00:56:33:03
Unknown
If you get people in the group were not necessarily very good at thinking of the puzzles or the creative stuff. They’ll be really, really good at the practical side.

00:56:33:03 – 00:56:46:02
Unknown
So it is all the other things that go around it. How does has the health and safety work? How does the reset work? Do you, you know, sorry, Nic, what are your thoughts on, on, time limits?

00:56:46:03 – 00:56:56:12
Unknown
The time creates a lot of stress and anxiety. For a lot of people where they may just say, well, I’m not going to do it because I’m stressed out and this is no good.

00:56:56:12 – 00:57:07:07
Unknown
you know, what do you think about this is this is down to good challenge management. So a good escape, good game and a good games master should get everybody out with about 30s to spare.

00:57:07:07 – 00:57:24:02
Unknown
Whilst giving them hints in a way that they don’t know, they’ve been given hints and should be able to pick up on the clues of people getting bored, or people or people getting frustrated. So actually, I mean, again, when we teach about this, it’s about how you do that and how you think about the clues that you’re given.

00:57:24:02 – 00:57:30:00
Unknown
too easy. Escape room is boring, too difficult is stressful, but it’s not navigating that path.

00:57:30:00 – 00:57:42:11
Unknown
So when we when we’ve been working with Escape Room, guest masters, now that they’ll often have it very tightly scheduled to know where people should be at a certain point, and at no point people can just be left.

00:57:42:11 – 00:58:01:06
Unknown
They’ve got plenty of time. So I think part of it is trusting in your games, master, that they their job is to make you have an optimum experience, and it’s almost like we should take that away. And thinking about how do we, as teachers, make our students have optimal learning experiences?

00:58:01:12 – 00:58:17:00
Unknown
So thinking about the theme and the narrative, and also some escape rooms have particularly some of the mystery ones, will have very in-depth, detailed narratives which involve a lot of reading. Again, I’ve seen a lot of educational ones that do that,

00:58:17:00 – 00:58:22:03
Unknown
which almost is taking away from the actual fun of being in the room if you’ve got to spend a lot of time reading.

00:58:22:03 – 00:58:47:00
Unknown
So just thinking about how you balance that, secrets and surprises, that’s what people will remember that you want to give them. That moment of thinking. I think it’s about thinking something is one thing, and then realizing that actually, it’s completely something else. Again, that second scene, the lighting, the props, the sound, the kind of the smell was again, students can be super creative with this.

00:58:47:00 – 00:59:04:04
Unknown
So what’s really important is the end game and getting them to think about how they manage people getting out and how they manage people not getting out. Because we say to them, you want them to be getting out with seconds to spare because they want to have the full experience, but they do want to get out. But if they don’t get out, that’s fine.

00:59:04:08 – 00:59:21:09
Unknown
But how are you going to manage that? How are you going to explain what happened. Yeah. So they’ve really got they’ve got to think about the whole thing. It’s not just the room, it’s they’re designing an experience and they want people to have the best experience, even if they don’t win the game. So again, it’s the kind of the debriefing, the briefing, the rules.

00:59:21:09 – 00:59:22:05
Unknown
How does it finish?

00:59:22:05 – 00:59:25:10
Unknown
that was that was my final slide. I I’ll share these slides. Valley.

00:59:25:10 – 00:59:33:05
Unknown
I’m pretty sure ChatGPT could help design a room. And again, I’m not I think it’s good for idea generation.

00:59:33:07 – 00:59:51:10
Unknown
The problem will be, is that it’ll probably design a room some already designed. And I think part of this is being able to the best escape rooms come up with new things. I’ll leave your hand up, and I’m aware my time is running out. Yeah, I have a question, and I’m very conscious of the time, so very quick.

00:59:51:11 – 01:00:04:06
Unknown
Did you explain how to design a room? But I do know that there are scape games or scape boxes which do not necessarily require a room per se. So in your experience, how important is the room?

01:00:04:06 – 01:00:12:04
Unknown
So I think in terms of the moving into the magic circle and the space, ideally you are in a separate space.

01:00:12:05 – 01:00:29:04
Unknown
I have seen it done. I mean, but obviously if you’ve got 200 students, you can’t have them all going into a room. It’s just there isn’t the time to do it, but I’ve seen it done. So, Liz Cable has written a lot. I’m just, I think if I, I’ll, I’ll find a link and send it to you.

01:00:29:04 – 01:01:01:12
Unknown
So she does a lot of things with escape boxes and, sort of escape games on mass. So she runs whole class escape games and she does things like she has like 30 boxes that she’ll go and put people into groups. It’s it’s not the same, I think, but it’s also what’s realistic. So I do one, which is a kind of intro, which is essentially done in an envelope, and the envelope has got a, a little thing in with a padlock on it, and then it’s got something so, so you can do it that way.

01:01:01:13 – 01:01:22:02
Unknown
And I think there’s something about if the puzzles stand up and they’re good enough and they’re fun enough, it doesn’t matter whether they’re in an Egyptian tomb or whether you’re sat at the table. And in some ways it’s yeah, you just the it’s not feasible to get large amounts students escape room very, very quickly. Unless you’re prepared to put a lot of resources into it.

01:01:22:02 – 01:01:43:09
Unknown
Thank you so much. I am very conscious that we are two minutes our time, and I’m not sure if there are more questions. So I’m very happy for anyone who wants to drop me a line or, I can I can put you to. I say this Capel and Scott Nicholson have written a really good book on designing escape rooms that sort of take you back.

01:01:43:09 – 01:01:50:10
Unknown
It’s really practical. Massively recommend that as a sort of if you. If you want it, if that’s the way you want to go.

01:01:50:10 – 01:02:02:08
Unknown
I thank you, Nick. We did have Scott Nicholson come I think a month or two before. Okay. So yeah. Yeah. So we, we have so yes he he’s absolutely you know he knows his stuff.

01:02:02:09 – 01:02:24:00
Unknown
Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you so much. It has been an honor, to listen to you, to, to listen to your experiences. And I love how you had three different puzzles. In, in in your talk, it is very rare to see, people coming in who have the puzzle created within so that that hooks us all up.

01:02:24:00 – 01:02:43:04
Unknown
And we all were working, although we were doing it silently. And yeah, it does create a lot of energy effort at your end. And also my experience with Escape Rooms, I have tweaked and experimented with some. It is also a social learning exercise to design an escape room. It is not a one person job as well.

01:02:43:05 – 01:02:59:08
Unknown
It becomes difficult. So as more as more faculty members can come together in small teams to design the. It makes the process more fun, more engaging, more challenging. As well. Thank you for your time. And thank you for inviting me.

01:02:59:08 – 01:03:05:09
Unknown
thank you, everybody, for listening. Thank you. I know I’m inspired for sure. Lots to think about.