Adaptability and Procedural Content Generation for Educational Escape Rooms

We present a literature review that aims to understand the role of the Educational Escape Room (EER) in improving the teaching, learning, and assessment processes through an EER design framework. The main subject is to identify the recent interventions in this field in the last five years. Our study focuses on understanding how it is possible to create an EER available to all students, namely visually challenged users. As a result of the implementation of new learning strategies that promote autonomous learning, a concern arose in adapting educational activities to each student's individual needs. To study the adaptability of each EER, we found the EER design framework essential to increase the student experience by promoting the consolidation of knowledge through narrative and level design. The results of our study show evidence of progress in students' performance while playing an EER, revealing that students' learning can be effective. Research on Procedural Content Generation (PCG) highlighted how important it is to implement adaptability in future studies of EERs. However, we found some limitations regarding the process of evaluating learning through the EERs, showing how important it is to study and implement learning analytics in future studies in this field

Dramatizing The Void: Crime Fiction\u27s Journey to Forgetting

Scholars often cite the transition from the golden age to the hardboiled tradition in the 1920s and 1930s as the most radical shift in crime fiction. By 1945, crime stories regularly exhibited destabilized language, increased interest in psychology of the mind, and a blatant rejection of conclusive endings as a means of exploring the unreliable nature of memory and eye-witness testimony. Whereas the crime fiction narratives preceding 1945 embodied a clear sense of logic and order, and established hermeneutics and signifying practices as the keys to unlocking the mysteries behind human behavior; post-45 crime fiction not only rejects these notions, but openly attacks them. Through their use of setting, their deployments of signifying practices, and their emphasis on methods of detection, pre-45 crime fiction narratives reiterate and uphold their trust in the reliability of the human mind and memory, while post-45 crime fiction uses the same generic conventions to undermine memory and hermeneutics on a larger scale. In highlighting this post-45 shift, this project not only uncovers the genre’s investment in memory, but it also clearly delineates the narrative mechanisms through which memory, and its common conceptions, are tested for reliability, accuracy, and meaning-making. In doing so, this project more broadly explores how literary representations of memory create avenues for exploring the ramifications these shifts have on cultural, legal, and cognitive theories of how we process, store, and reconstruct information regarding our pasts

STEM escape rooms for public engagement

Escape rooms are a relatively new cultural phenomenon, attracting a wide range of audiences to test their puzzle-solving skills. While this format has been trialled in an educational context, there has been little exploration of it as a tool for engagement. We ran a STEM-based escape room, open to the public, over five days at a science centre in Malta. This was an exploratory exercise to determine whether escape rooms could be successful in an informal science engagement context. Over seventy players attempted the game and completed our evaluation. Our results suggest that escape rooms can be used in engagement contexts as they provide a positive experience that encourages future interactions with science. They may also draw audiences not normally interested in science and help them engage with scientific content in a more accessible manner. Interestingly, players were able to persist in engaging with content they found difficult while still finding it enjoyable, which has implications for the science communication of complex topics. Finally, players perceived that they were able to learn science through the escape room, which may increase their self-efficacy

Integrating Immersive Experiences to Instruction through BreakoutEDU: Lessons Learned

This study employed an escape room motif to engage students to use information literacy course material to solve puzzles. Students practiced research techniques in a classroom environment that bypassed their expectations of traditional course instruction. Instructor objectives were to increase student engagement with the course material, and to foster teamwork among students in a cooperative learning environment. Authors initially obtained 9 kits from Breakout EDU, a company specializing in immersive games. Games were devised for three of the course units, with each unit identifying 4-5 information literacy skills or concepts. The puzzles were focused on reinforcement of the key concepts. After each escape room class session, students completed a short survey. At the end of the semester students completed another survey about their experiences. Over 80% of students indicated the games helped them understand course concepts. Comparisons of final grades in the gamified courses with previous, non-gamified courses revealed that students achieved more A’s and fewer D’s and F’s in the gamified courses.  Future directions for study include flipping game design to student groups, and further analysis of correlations between concepts learned through traditional teaching techniques and those learned in Breakout EDU classes.

Escape Puzzler

This project is a systems design project. The goal of the project was to complete an online game for the purpose of entertaining an end-user. There is also additional research potential with analyzing the end-user behavior. This project showcases various skills learned at Dakota State University. This project required systems analysis, research of information technologies, database design, and project management. About 50% of the planning phase was dedicated to scanning the IT industry for various technologies. We researched web hosting providers that would support the technologies we wanted to use. Also, a survey of available game engines was conducted. Additionally, all of the creative elements of the game were drafted during the design phase. Game mechanics were also contemplated. We decided to outsource the game assets, such as graphics and audio. However, no single vendor could provide everything needed. This led to a careful consideration of purchases to ensure that all of the game assets would weave together seamlessly. Finally, time was dedicated to create several technical artifacts, such as wireframe diagrams, entity relationship diagrams, and UML class diagrams. During the implementation phase, all of the planning was put into action. There were three main components created: the client, the MVC web application, and the class library that contained all of the core game logic. A supplementary unit / integration project was also created dedicated to testing. The end result was a finished game. Escape Puzzler is now live on https://www.escapepuzzler.fun and it is currently being tested. Once testing is complete, another iteration of development will help refine and polish the game even further

Make Your Escape: Experiences with Gamified Library Programming

To increase student engagement, the Humboldt State University Library ventured into the realm of gamified programming, exploring several strategies with the goal of trans- forming library outreach and instruction. Our efforts range from simple outreach to highly structured information literacy instruction and workshops that use gamification to encourage students to engage with knowledge practices and dispositions outlined in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Using gamified activities in library instruction led us to create lesson plans that are purely game-based, including escape room drop-in sessions where students race against the clock to solve a series of puzzles in order to “escape” the room. This model aimed to promote collaboration and problem-solving skills through inquiry-based learning

Using Immersive Fantasy to Engage Marginalized Youth: Promoting STEM Engagement Using Mystery Rooms

Educational systems today often fail to imbue students with an interest or value for learning. Students in underprivileged areas disengage in education at young ages and are unlikely to pursue STEM education and careers. The purpose of this project is to engage marginalized youth in STEM education through the use of an immersive narrative experience called a Mystery Room. Through analysis of students\u27 perception of time, verbal feedback, and behavioral observations, we determined that this strategy successfully captures student interest and has a significant effect on STEM engagement. Our findings are intended to assist educators in implementing active learning to engage students

The Soft Skills Hidden in Educational Escape Experiences for Middle School Students: A Case Study in South Texas, USA

Gamification of the classroom motivates students and improves both academic and soft skills. The use of educational escape games as a form of gamification shows potential in developing students’ soft skills such as teamwork, problem solving, and communication skills. This study sought to determine if middle school students engage in similar soft skills experiences while participating in educational escape rooms. An eighth grade English Language Arts teacher and the primary investigator participated in an action research project to design educational escape experiences over the course of eight months for a middle school in South Texas. The goal of the project was to design classroom experiences to engage students in the content curriculum while also encouraging the growth of soft skills (skills such as teamwork and leadership that are desirable and apply across a variety of situations). The research questions guiding this project were: 1) What soft skills do middle school students engage in while participating in an educational escape experience?, 2) How do students engage in the use of these soft skills?, and 3) How can teachers manipulate the escape experience design to include soft skills? Results of the study showed that during educational escape experiences students demonstrated a growth mindset through their motivation to engage in the problem, use of problem-solving skills involving using background knowledge and looking for patterns, and resiliency in completing the challenges. Students believed they could complete the challenges and persisted until the challenge was completed, regardless of beating opponents or winning prizes. Keywords: escape experiences, soft skills, hidden curriculum, innovative teaching, middle school DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-14-04 Publication date:May 31st 202

The Art of Being Elsewhere:Neoliberal Institutions of Care

The being of human beings and, in particular, their wellbeing is profoundly spatial and temporal. We feel well in dramaturgically stimulating, sheltered, yet expansive spaces that lend themselves to daydreaming, much like we feel well in “thick” time that, like a complex melody, textures our existence aurally, kinesthetically, and propriocentrically (influencing our body’s sense of balance). This existential relation is created through movement, sound, language, chronotypes, physical and symbolic objects, all of which weave bio-social matrixes, micro-cultural landscapes, even individual inscapes – internalized terrains of symbolic meaning. This essay offers a socio-phenomenological account of a medium-security forensic service unit River House, part of the Bethlem Royal hospital, a psychiatric hospital located in Bromley, south London. Its aim is to articulate the interdependence of practice, space, and inscape, while simultaneously shedding light on a very particular, emergent form of existential vulnerability caused by the increasing precarization, the reponsibilization of the individual, and the culture of blame

A decalogue to designing time loops in video games

Games have a history of repetition, from the days at the arcade where death meant meeting a paywall or restarting another day. To the first home consoles with short but difficult games where players restarted over and over from the first level when they got out of lives. Eventually games evolved into more and more accessible ways to let players save and load whenever needed, being able to finish longer and longer games in different sessions. As a result now replaying was out of the box, saving before a difficult encounter, loading an earlier state if the result of the players actions were unsatisfactory, etc. Leading to game design with bigger maps with more things to do and well, repeat. From 2017 and onwards a series of games launched to the market: Sexy Brutale (2017), Minit (2018), Outer Wilds (2019), Twelve Minutes (2021), Deathloop (2021) among others, some of these heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (2000). These games follow a simple rule that changes how they are perceived and played: A time limitation, in these games the clock is constantly ticking against the player and when the time limit finally arrives players are set back to the starting position of the game (or last checkpoint). Similarly to the games on the arcades or home consoles but not dependent on player skill within the movements of the player character inside the game. Instead the challenge proposition comes from the missing information about their surroundings, player actions within them and most importantly the constant changes that happen to the game world with the pass of time. Via the repetition of the time loop the players can learn the “whats” and “whens” of the world, learning the schedule of the things and interact with it. Getting access to new parts of the game gradually unlocking it as they get more knowledgeable about the loop as if playing a metroidvania whereas instead of getting new abilities they receive useful information. Until they master the time loop they are trapped in and become proficient traveling within it and eventually finish the game. This paper researches the answers to a question; What differentiates what makes a game with time loops from any other and how to design and develop them. Threatening the relation the player has with the game world exploring what makes a game into one of the genre, studying the state of the art and analyzing fully develop games in order to create guidelines to further help game developers that are faced with the challenge of designing a game with time loops as one of its fundamental pillars. And with those guidelines creating a level design document of our own to validate the assumptions and statements made after the research