I’ve done a couple of Escape Rooms over the past few months, and I always find them to be pretty engaging and revealing experiences. From the in situ problem-solving to the ad hoc collaborations to post-experience discussions, I think I always come away a little wiser about myself. Some friends of mine at the university library and I have been kicking around the idea of building our own ER, not just for fun, but as a new kind of library service. This is what we’re thinking…

These rooms always have some kind of theme, ancient treasure, the wild west, a spaceship, etc. these are great hooks for the everyday entertainment crowd (who hasn’t imagined themselves as Indiana Jones?), but what if these themes were actually aligned to course material? What if your course in medieval literature came with a medieval castle escape room experience (better keep those characters from Canterbury Tales straight if you want to leave)? What if your course in chemistry had a chem lab escape room experience (sorry, that lock uses right-handed enantiomers only!)? Would these experiences improve learning outcomes? Our hypothesis is that they would, but what would it take to create these experiences for so many different courses?

The library is a natural ally for this sort of endeavor. University libraries provide centralized services for all university courses. They regularly help faculty and students track down books and multimedia and they offer assistance like makerspaces and production studios for other courses, so maybe they could offer a customizable escape room shell that you could use to create an escape room experience that integrates into a course. What we’re imagining as an escape room framework would need to have a dedicated physical space (not so easy in universities these days, but bear with me) that has all the usual escape room accoutrements like video cameras and mics to record the experience and interactions, and some internal infrastructure, maybe wired or more likely wireless network, that lets you hook up five or six modular puzzles to create the experience. The library could house a collection of puzzles, some off the shelf, some designed by students (like those from my Interaction Design course), and instructors could choose five or six that they want for their experience. Then the library staff would work with the instructor to adapt content from their course to suit the puzzles and create the narrative for the experience.

We’ve already started working through what this would take. The first batch of puzzles will be designed by the students in my classes this fall. They will be basic electro-mechanical devices with unique triggers and affordances, but they will also come with instructions on how to customize them quickly and easily, by printing out cards from a template to change the experience from literature to chemistry for example. Once these are built we will pilot the assembly and narrativizing pieces to see what it takes to develop an experience using these pieces. Instructors won’t adopt this approach if the barrier to entry is too high so we want to keep it as simple as possible, online forms and templates mostly. Then we move on to recruiting courses and testing to see if students who use ERs end up performing better in course-defined criteria. Stay tuned for updates…