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After a short breakt due to vacation and illness, we have been eagerly working towards our conference in May. Next week, the time has finally come: the date of our online conference educational Escapegames.

Originally, the event was intended to network with other escapegame-projects, share experiences, and help each other improve our games. But both at other meetings and from the registrations, we noticed that many are still new to the topic. Wherever we talk about our game, we get the same reactions: Curiosity, enthusiasm, and very rarely some skepticism.

But most of all, we get peppered with questions. „Is a game like this really any good for teaching?“, „Can I do something like this in my subject or does it only work in chemistry?“, „How much time do I need for a game like this?“ We want to address these and more questions at the conference.

We are very excited about the many registrations from different departments and also from other universities. We can’t wait to dive in and discuss with you. For those who have registered, a link to the meeting room will follow later this week. For those who can’t be there, you will be able to find the results and a summary of our meeting on our blog afterwards.

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The E-Teatime is a great format at the Ostfalia HaW to discuss topics around e-learning. Since we ourselves always like to participate to learn new things and discuss hot topics, it was only a matter of time that we also plan an E-Tea.

Yesterday was the day and we held our digital tea time. We showed our game and talked about the journey behind it. Together with out participants we considered what such a game might look like in other disciplines and what gamification tools our learning management system Moodle offers.

We thank everyone who participated and those who will still watch the recording of the event. For members of the university, the video is available in the e-Teaching Infothek.

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Teaching is certainly a serious subject. And it remains so – even if you’re working with educational games. Genres like serious games prove that, and our Escapegame is no exception. Nevertheless, games hardly qualifies as such if they’re no fun.

We took this to heart during the development of our game. We’ve been getting together for game nights since the beginning of the project, where we test other escape games and crack puzzles. We also approach our photo shoots, sound recordings, and shoots in a relaxed manner and with a lot of fun. The students should be able to see this in the final product, and meanwhile we also create small intermediate things like this small outtake video that shows our team during filming:

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After we finished the prologue and improved it with the feedback we got, we are now working on Act 1. Story-wise, we are on the game characters first day at his/her new employer „LowKey Fashion“. After passing the assessment center, their character has a kind of scavenger hunt ahead of him/her to gain access to the new workplace and get to know the company’s premises.

For this act, we use the H5P activity „Interactive movie“.

Unlike the 3D virtual tour we used for the prologue, the interactive film is compatible with many other H5P activities – it is possible to include different types of quizzes and, for example, drag-and-drop tasks. We used the latter for a puzzle in which students are asked to fill a shelf with molecules, paying attention to different placement rules. We inserted other puzzles into the movie as image files and students can fill in their answers via a simple cloze. For example: Right at the beginning, they have to deduce the room number of LowKey Fashion’s lab from the following note.

The great advantage of the interactive film is that you can experiment with different other activities and jump to different places in the video depending on the answer given. If students come up with the wrong solution, they end up in the wrong room – an empty tea kitchen with no one to help them. They have to start the puzzle again. If their new solution is still wrong, they find a locked door with a note that this is not the lab either. This sequence repeats until they come to the correct solution. Only when they find it, and thus the lab, can they continue watching the video and advance to the other puzzles.

Writing the script and filming takes up more time and effort than designing the 3D virtual tour, but it can also be a lot of fun. We used a Go-Pro camera for this, so students see all the events from a first-person perspective. This puts them right in the middle of the action and allows them to identify with their character. As a little goodie, a video with outtakes is available to them at the end, including scenes like the following:

We are now deep into planning our conference. The goal is (interdisciplinary) exchange on escaperoom games in teaching.

We want to see material from other escaperooms, share questions and experiences, and create new content together. To do so, there will be two mini-blocks, each with two workshops, that participants can choose from:

Block 1:

The Storytelling workshop will focus on the questions of what kind of story escaperooms or games need and what makes a good story. Also we want to look where to get inspiration for new stories.

In the puzzle workshop we want to focus on the lowest common denominator of all escaperoom games: the puzzles. All participants are welcome to bring their own and we will also present ours. However, there will be time to create entirely new puzzles.

Block 2:

„Evaluation of Fun“ is about sharing evaluation methods. Together, we want to discuss what can be used to measure the success of escaperoom games in teaching – especially when it comes to elusive factors like motivation.

In „Gamification 2go – Container Solutions“ we deal with the creation of a toolbox for escaperoom games. What do I need when developing an escaperoom for my lectures? What experiences can other teachers benefit from? How can we compress the format to give others a kit for their very own escaperoom?

The most important dates are also available on our conference page. As soon as the planning is completed, the registration will also take place on the said page.

The 5th International Conference on Sustainable Globalization was held in Kerala, India, from January 7-10. After the COVID pandemic break, which allowed for a purely virtual conference alone, organized by Ostfalia University (Dr. Hedda Sander) in 2022, this conference was again a physical meeting event. However, as a lesson learned from the pandemic situation, this 5th annual conference offered the option for hybrid presentations and streaming for the first time.

The conference was organized by Dr. Abey Kuruvilla (University of Wisconsin at Parkside, Program Chair), Dr. Robinet Jacob (Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, India, Organizational Chair), and Dr. Hedda Sander (Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Center for Scientific Interdisciplinary Risk and Sustainability Management, Review Chair). The conference program offered sessions in four tracks on Education, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Tourism and Business, and Sustainability, Environment and Risk Management, followed by two workshops on Food and Energy Security in Eurasia and Sustainability (Best Practice Examples). The unique feature of the conference is that participants come not only from academia, but also from the entrepreneurship and government sectors to exchange ideas and develop solutions to the challenges of moving towards a more sustainable world. This approach has already enabled the development of start-ups in the past, such as the student mobility app „Abroad“ or the networking and exchange of best practices between municipalities regarding environmental challenges.

In this context, our team was represented with no less than two presentations by Dr. Hedda Sander. In one of them she presented our Chemification project and showed the attendees first insights into the game and its framework. In particular, the visual material directly from our game met with great interest and discussions have already arisen about joint workshops with international participation from the USA and India for various areas of teaching. The second presentation dealt with the topic „Cost of Climate Change: Financial Consequences for Fisheries, Tourism and Prevention Measures as assessed via Environmental Monitoring“.

We are already looking forward to the 6th International Conference on Sustainable Globalization in January 2024, mark your calendars.

Even before Christmas, we were able to give students a first glimpse of what our Escaperoom will one day become. The short prologue introduces the setting of the game and already holds the first tricky puzzles.

Students start in the Moodle course on general chemistry that they are familiar with and must first find out the enrollment key for the Escape course. Once enrolled in the course, an H5P virtual tour awaits them, in which the puzzles are embedded as links or interactive elements. Each puzzle has a solution word that is written down and asked at the end of the virtual tour. Only those who solve all the puzzles unlock the acts still to come.

So far, this is test content, but even the initial feedback from the students has helped us improve the game enormously. The queries have clearly shown where we need to explain more or pointed out small weaknesses in the puzzles. We can now take these insights into the creation of the following acts and the actual game and revise the prologue at the same time.

With Frederic Körner and Phil Kühnholz, the Chemification project has received valuable reinforcement. As master’s students at Ostfalia HaW, the two not only bring in-depth knowledge of chemistry, but have themselves just attended the seminars and lectures that we want to accompany with our Escaperoom game.

As tutors for these very lectures, they also have a direct contact to the students and will therefore also run the game as gamemasters and be available to answer questions.

In addition, they will assist in both the design and evaluation of the game and Chemification project.

On September 1st, we will start our work in the project „Chemification – Digitalization in Studies: Activating learning for first-year students through gamification in STEM subjects using the example of fundamentals of chemistry“.

For a long time, we at Ostfalia HaW have been toying with the idea of an Escaperoom game for teaching the basics of chemistry. But it was not until the rapid changes during the Corona Pandemic, which brought about a significant increase in online elements and technical possibilities at the university, that this idea became tangible for us.

We are happy to finally be able to implement our idea through the funding as a project of the „Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre“ (Foundation Innovation in University Teaching).