Chapter 10 – Playful practicals: breaking free from educational norms with onlin
Chapter 10 – Playful practicals: breaking free from educational norms with online escape rooms
Dr Emma Gillaspy; Dr Abhi Jones; Gemma Spencer; and Julia Robinson
Recreational escape rooms are becoming increasingly popular as social immersive experiences (Veldkamp et al., 2020). Escape rooms challenge players to work together in order to solve puzzles and complete tasks to ‘escape the room’ within a specific time. Play is well known to improve cognitive development in both children and adults (Piaget, 1962; Vygotsky, 1962) and gamification fosters the relationship between fun, focus and learning outcomes (Tulloch, 2014; van Gaalen et al., 2021). Escape rooms therefore offer a fun and novel way of developing interpersonal skills and effective team working and universities have begun to apply this approach across multiple disciplines. This chapter shares our experience of designing and delivering online escape rooms to develop practical skills in healthcare education and considers further playful applications across Higher Education.
Developing an interprofessional healthcare online escape room
Healthcare education standards highlight the importance of interprofessional teamwork, leadership and communication for improved patient outcomes therefore escape rooms offer an opportunity to develop these skills in an engaging and effective way. Escape rooms also allow the students to ‘fail’ in a safe space, providing an opportunity to reflect on their response to challenge, facilitating deeper learning experiences and developing emotional intelligence and resilience. This playful concept was adapted by the Schools of Nursing and Midwifery and Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Central Lancashire to develop clinical simulation escape rooms. These were initially designed as face-to-face practical sessions using high fidelity mannequins with the clinical equipment needed to save the patient in locked boxes. The students generated codes to unlock the boxes by completing clinical calculations and other patient-related puzzles, for example choosing the correct oxygen mask or antibiotic combination.
Once the pandemic hit, the team quickly adapted the escape rooms into digital learning experiences for healthcare students. In these innovative online spaces, students work together in live sessions facilitated using Microsoft Teams. Split into small multidisciplinary groups, 4-6 students work as a team, exploring a timed interactive multimedia scenario to identify and solve clinical puzzles, save the patient and escape the ward. One practical session based on the sepsis pathway can be seen here whilst a flat image of this 360-degree simulation can be viewed below.
To solve these scenarios, the students must rely on their collective clinical knowledge and draw upon their understanding of the different expertise of each discipline. This reliance on each other in a real-time activity facilitates an active approach to developing practical teamwork, communication