Abstract:

Strategic Foresight as a discipline of Social Sciences is part of futures studies seeks to explore futures to influence them from the present. The Escape room "Future Exploration" seeks to become a new way of teaching-learning the concepts, principles, approaches, methodologies, and tools of Strategic Foresight, through the design of a virtual collaborative learning space based on the solution of conceptual challenges.

The integral experience is conceptualized as a space trip that consists of three moments: takeoff, space station and landing. The space station is made up of four themed rooms, where each one constitutes its own escape room with specific challenges. In room 1 called "The future in the past", the challenge consists of solving conceptual challenges about the approaches and concepts of Strategic Foresight. It is made up of three spaces that cover prehistory, ancient civilizations, and original cultures. In this room, challenges such as putting together puzzles, associating images with symbols and writing associated concepts are solved.

The present is studied in room 2 called "The futurists today", where the challenges consist of solving conceptual challenges on Foresight strategies, attitudes towards the future and Foresight approaches. In addition, the work of prestigious world futurists is reviewed. The challenges are solved with the association of photos to biographies and geographical spaces, association of figures to concepts and the composition of hidden phrases.

The Prospective methodologies are studied in room 3 called “The exploration of futures”. Here the great challenge consists in taking an ordered tour of the four stages of the prospective process to find and organize the clues about the prospective tools: competency tree, SWOT analysis, structural analysis, Peter Schwartz axes and importance-governance matrix. The solution of challenges is based on the skills to associate images to concepts, the correct location of objects, the manipulation of objects, the association of numbers to concepts, writing, the interpretation of symbols, among others.

Finally, the future is studied in room 4 called "Tomorrowland", where the challenge is to find and organize clues about the types of scenarios and their characteristics. In this room, challenges are solved such as the identification of scenarios, the association of images, texts & colors, and the symbols interpretation.

The educational experience is carried out at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico with more than 100 students from different disciplines during 2022. The Escape Room "Future Exploration" has provided students with a virtual environment for collaborative learning of Strategic Foresight in a playful and experiential way with visual and auditory effects. It was possible to design a bilingual Spanish-English virtual reality resource for the development of collaborative experiences in both face-to-face and virtual formats with successful results. In addition, the Escape Room "Future Exploration" has opened a range of possibilities to propose flexible learning activities for the conceptual study of Strategic Foresight to be used as learning, evaluation, review, affirmation and/or conclusion of the contents of the discipline.

Keywords:

Virtual reality, escape room, Strategic Foresight.