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The virtual escape room game used to educate a hospital system's employees about medical literature was a hit. They drew names for prizes as an incentive to get nurses and other employees to try their escape room, but it was noted that the activity was so well-liked, no one who completed the final challenge even asked what the prize was. A sense of accomplishment is apparently a reward in itself. Several requests for assistance with library resources came through as employees discovered the library through the game. Analytics showed that the library website had a higher access rate during the time the game was available, demonstrating that many people visited the site after finishing the escape room. Gamification of education has proven time and again to be an effective way of engaging students and advertising services. Their Frankenstein of a virtual escape room proved to be a monster of a success.
This setup proved surprisingly effective, Functioning similarly to escape rooms built with more complex systems.
Building, with very limited resources, a virtual escape room to teach nurses in a large healthcare system how to access library resources is a game of fitting the correct pieces into the right spots to make it usable. One can make such a thing work by utilizing a few familiar computer applications and applying a lot of imagination.
Introduction
Have you ever locked yourself out of your office? Contacting security or finding a co-worker with an extra key is usually the solution to getting the door open. But what if you were locked inside your office, after hours, without your phone, and there was no electricity? How would you escape?
This scenario sounds like the perfect setup for a game-a game with the purpose of teaching a skill. This might work better in a virtual environment so that it would reach a larger audience, but where does a would-be designer even begin? There are inherent challenges involving knowledge of computer programs and digital tools, but with enough imagination and just the right amount of know-how, it can be done. A library can build a virtual escape room and engage users in such a way that it becomes a teaching tool, exemplifying how gamification can be used as education.
Escape Rooms-A Brief Overview
There is a plethora of escape rooms in the world, both physical and virtual. They are built for a variety of reasons, most of which are for the purpose of entertainment. According to the 2016 book Escape Room Rules: How to Create an Amazing Game by Ever NowCo, physical escape rooms have their roots in Asia. The book notes that "overworked businessmen and exhausted students needed an outlet for stress," and the immersive challenge of an escape game proved ideal. Early escape activities even allowed participants to practically destroy the room in their efforts to break out. The trend of playing (not destroying) escape rooms spread throughout the world; today, many metropolitan areas and tourist destinations feature one or more physical escape room attractions.
As for virtual escape rooms, they became ubiquitous with the invention of the internet, but they may have predated the in-person escape room. Game developer John Wilson is often credited with creating the first computer game escape room, the text-based Behind Closed Doors. A Japanese developer is cited as having shared the first online escape experience, Crimson Room (escapely.com/historyof-escape-rooms). The origin of the virtual escape room as a teaching tool is a bit fuzzier. Early adapters seemed to have begun this teaching trend by incorporating a virtual component into physical escape rooms to educate users about how to navigate websites and do online searches. In 2019, Norwich University's Sullivan Museum and History Center detailed the creation of an escape room that had a challenge involving using the center's website and doing an online search of the library collection (Reference Services Review). A researcher could, with enough digging, probably find even earlier examples of these virtual incorporations into physical escape rooms used for education, but it does not take much work to pinpoint when such activities went completely online.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a nationwide lockdown in the U.S., beginning in March 2020. Faced with the cancellation of in-person events, both schools and libraries were quick to move escape room activities fully online. It only took Pennsylvania librarian Sydney Krawiec 4 hours to produce a digital escape room to replace an in-person event (theverge.com/2020/7/15/21324558 /google-forms-virtualescape-rooms-librarians-games-puzzles-homeschooling). She used Google Forms and an idea she had previously utilized as an 8th grade teacher-further evidence of the existence of early digital escape rooms. Many librarians and educators have since adopted the simple Google Forms escape room format or modified the idea and used other computer applications to create educational escape activities. But our institution, INTEGRIS Health's INTEGRIS Medical Library in Oklahoma, does not use Google apps. The following is an example of how we cobbled together an effective escape room activity using Microsoft PowerPoint, PDFs, and Springshare's LibGuides.
A Virtual Escape Room- How We Did It Without Google Apps
Librarians at INTEGRIS Medical Library built a virtual escape room activity to teach and promote the availability of the library's online resources. While not a traditional "escape," the activity mirrored the escape room concept by requiring participants to follow instructions and gather clues to reach a final point. The activity also had a name that reflected its escape room feel by turning the word "escape" into an acronym: Education Simulating, for Caregivers, the Availability and Procedures for E-resources (ESCAPE). This title draws on the popular nursing school pedagogy of simulating clinical scenarios, indicating to users that the steps within the virtual activity have real-world application.
Once the idea was conceived, we began looking at ways to easily create a virtual escape room. Google products were out of the question, as INTEGRIS Health blocks the use of these on its internal network due to security concerns. While it was noted that several libraries used Springshare's LibWizard-a LibGuides add-on for creating forms, surveys, quizzes, and tutorials-this was not a viable option due to the additional cost to add it to the medical library's LibGuides subscription. Other potential platforms were discarded due to our lack of coding knowledge, potential organizational content blocking, and the aforementioned budgetary limitations. Ultimately, by leveraging basic WCM skills and creatively utilizing existing resources, a librarian successfully built a simple point-and-click interface for the virtual escape room. This setup proved surprisingly effective, functioning similarly to escape rooms built with more complex systems.
Construction began with the use of PowerPoint presentation software to create static images with embedded hyperlinks. This was accomplished by cutting an image apart to create individual objects, embedding URLs in each object, and then reassembling the pieces into a whole (see the top image on this page).
When converting slides to PDFs, embedded hyperlinks produced in PowerPoint carry over to the new file format, which allowed us to hide hyperlinks and create hotspots behind objects or lines of text in a static image. Once the rooms of the activity were built in PowerPoint, each slide containing a room or set of instructions was individually saved as a PDF (see the middle image below).
Those who are familiar with the LibGuides platform might wonder why we did not build the entire escape room as a PowerPoint and upload it to the library's LibGuides website. We considered this, but to better support users accessing the game on various devices (desktop, laptop, mobile, etc.) and to provide more versatile navigation, we decided to use PDFs, as they are likely to display correctly in different environments.
After producing the individual PDFs, a webpage within the library's LibGuides website was established to house the escape room. LibGuides offers various website creation tools, making our library website an ideal platform for the escape room game we designed. Specifically, LibGuides allows administrators to keep certain page zones hidden from public view. Consequently, we were able to upload all of the escape room's PDFs to a dedicated page, ensuring they were accessible during the game but remained hidden from general users (see the image on the bottom left).
You might ask, "What if the end user doesn't have a PDF reader?" LibGuides designers foresaw this problem and took it into consideration when developing the product. When the administrator of a Lib- Guides website uploads a PDF to the platform and then opens the file as an end user might, they'll find that the LibGuides web server processes all requests through a PHP script. Consequently, all PDFs are handled as single PHP webpages, opening directly in the browser. For escape room design, this means that if files are uploaded to LibGuides and the PHP addresses are used in embedded links, users can navigate the activity seamlessly.
Challenges and Other Considerations
When building such a thing as the Frankenstein of an escape room I detailed, it is important for the designer to have some proficiency in PowerPoint, PDF creation, and LibGuides page development. It can take a significant amount of time to create a virtual escape room, and a lack of knowledge of basic computer programs can be a serious roadblock. While the internet does offer numerous prebuilt PowerPoint escape room templates, the process of adapting these generic frameworks can still prove to be a considerable hurdle for individuals without at least a moderate level of technical proficiency.
A critical consideration when developing a virtual escape room is the likelihood of users accessing the activity on mobile devices. While converting PDFs to PHP pages helped ensure the INTEGRIS Medical Library's escape room was consistently available online, we found that these pages didn't automatically resize on all mobile devices. This resulted in parts of the activity being difficult to see, hindering clue discovery. We became aware of this issue during testing across various devices, but unfortunately, a limitation within the LibGuides platform prevented us from implementing a fix.
When building a virtual escape room, balancing entertainment and educational goals also needs to be a consideration. While the primary aim is often to engage users and provide an enjoyable experience, it's equally crucial to avoid presenting the learning material in a dry or tedious manner that transforms the game into an uninspired chore. Realizing and addressing this problem is another excellent reason for testing your escape room before it goes live. We were given vital feedback by test subjects that the end challenge was too difficult. We changed the end of the game toa request for more-easy-to-find information, and subsequent tests were satisfactory and successful.
Conclusion
The virtual escape room game we used to educate a hospital system's employees about medical literature was a hit. We drew names for prizes as an incentive to get nurses and other employees to try our escape room, but it was noted that the activity was so well-liked, no one who completed the final challenge even asked what the prize was. A sense of accomplishment is apparently a reward in itself. Several requests for assistance with library resources came through as employees discovered the library through the game. Analytics showed that the library website had a higher access rate during the time the game was available, demonstrating that many people visited the site after finishing the escape room. Gamification of education has proven time and again to be an effective way of engaging students and advertising services. Our Frankenstein of a virtual escape room proved to be a monster of a success.
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