Escape the welcome cliché

Abstract

The University of Surrey Library and Learning Support Services (LLSS) recognised an increasing need to transform its welcome, induction and orientation activities for students. Past activities have entailed delivering information to students in ways which may have led to information overload and lack of engagement by students with library services. The LLSS have been exploring innovative ways to welcome students to university, moving away from didactic approaches. This paper presents one such innovation produced among a series of activities during 2017/18, an educational escape room, informed by the work of Walsh (2017). This activity invited students to solve a series of themed puzzles in the escape room, introducing them to library services and information literacy (IL) skills to support their studies. This report provides an account of the challenges and positive outcomes encountered in designing the escape room, with a view to sharing good learning and teaching practice.

Evaluating an Educational Escape Room Conducted Remotely for Teaching Software Engineering

“…In recent years, escape rooms have drawn the attention of educators and organizations in the cultural sector, which has led to these activities being used for educational purposes, not only in museums [4]- [7] and libraries [8], [9], but also in formal learning scenarios as part of the curriculum. In addition to using ludic escape rooms in educational settings, teachers have started to create actual educational escape rooms: escape rooms that require students to master field-specific knowledge and skills in order to solve the puzzles and succeed in the activity.…”

The Mystery Room: discovering the flexibility of an information literacy-based educational escape room

“…What fascinated us about this workshop was how flexible it was for different audiences. The appeal to a range of audiences was also something Wise et al (2018) noticed when more advanced students voluntarily signed up for their orientation escape room. Each iteration of our workshop was successful in its own way, but when we compared how different audiences responded, we saw how accommodating this workshop was.…”

“…Academic librarians have employed escape rooms as part of orientation and outreach programming, welcoming students to the library by familiarizing them with services and resources (Gregor, 2019;Shostack, 2019;Wise, Lowe, Hill, Barnett, & Barton, 2018). Pun Pun (2017) urged readers to consider using the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework in their escape rooms (p. 335).…”

“…In the initial planning stages we considered our physical space limitations and collected a variety of discarded library materials, a technique used by other librarians (Gregor, 2019;Wise et al, 2018;Sundsbø, 2019). We received a grant of $354 from the New Mexico Library Foundation to purchase props.…”

La habitación de escape como estrategia en la resolución de problemas

“…A su vez, es imprescindible que verse sobre contenidos propios de la asignatura (Edwards et al, 2019;Kinio et al, 2019). No obstante, también existen propuestas basadas en habitaciones de escape para conocer recursos estructurales como la biblioteca de la Universidad (Wise et al, 2018).…”