Build Your Own Escape Room: Theoretical Foundations, Models, and Practical Design Tips
Brief Abstract
You are trapped in a room and the clock is ticking down! There are a collection of puzzles scattered around the space and you must work alongside friends, coworkers, and potentially strangers to escape in time. Join us as we look under the hood and break down the process for designing, developing, and implementing Escape Rooms in physical or virtual environments.
Escape Rooms offer a framework to engage participants in collaborative challenges, encourage individuals to overcome failure through play, and utilize mystery and curiosity to motivate learning experiences. Such activities are rich for a variety of contexts like team building, self-directed learning, and breaking down social barriers in classrooms, as part of professional development or to hook the attention of individuals from any learning environment. At its core, Escape Rooms can be as simple as a collection of small challenges that are narratively connected. We will focus on this accessible form of Escape Room activities.
During this session we will begin by exploring readymade Escape Room activities from four different creators who bring a variety of approaches to this space. Additionally, these examples are crafted with the intention you could reuse or remix them to suit your own needs. Following this experiential activity, the presenters will share their familiarity, scholarship, and recommendations for using Escape Rooms as engaging activities. Lastly, there will be significant development time for attendees to experiment and craft their own Escape Room challenges alongside the aid of the presenters.
By the end of this session, participants will have the beginnings of their own Escape Room ready to deploy or expand.Following this session, participants will be able to:
- Access the readymade, and easily customizable, Escape Room elements and activities to implement into their own project
- Develop a prototype Escape Room
- Exclusive access to the OLC Accelerate 2022 Escape Room
Presenters


Extended Abstract