Just Your Average Frankenstein: Creating a Virtual Escape Room to Teach Information Literacy

Headnote

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....