Abstract:

The best applications of technology within education create experiences that students could not have through any traditional means, and these tools deepen and broaden student engagement with course content. The most successful of these also leverage the technologies and terminologies that mirror those in use socially and recreationally by students.

Building upon the rapidly increasing interest in "escape rooms" (sometimes called "puzzle rooms" or "riddle rooms") and the technological buzz around augmented reality, we have developed a flexible toolset for building academically-focused escape room experiences that leverage augmented reality.

The benefits of this approach are many-fold. Traditional escape rooms require expensive and space-intensive physical build-outs, and require ongoing maintenance. This limits their useful life. Within education, these have been used as one-time or short-duration "installation" experiences, but they cannot be sustained. In addition, the traditional escape room experience is purely recreational, with no deeper purpose.

By leveraging augmented reality, we can build a virtual escape room experience, complete with a deep and dynamic interactive universe, without requiring physical construction or ongoing maintenance. Delivered via a flexible smartphone platform, these experiences can be updated over time or deliver custom experiences in response to student input.

We are currently piloting this approach through a partnership with the Minneapolis Institute of Art, building an experience ("Riddle Mia This") which will allow players to explore the museum and deeply connect with works of art, while engaging in a fun, social experience.

As our pilot concludes, we will be moving into the creation of deep, subject-matter-specific experiences which ask students to engage in complex critical thinking tasks to solve puzzles. These puzzles will build on their learned subject-matter expertise and their diverse backgrounds. We believe this approach can have broad, cross-disciplinary application within higher education. In addition to exploring subject-matter-specific content, these experiences build core career competencies that are critical to 21st century success, including teamwork and leadership and problem solving.

The toolchain we are developing will be freely available as open source software for other institutions to remix to build their own experiences. We also believe these tools are accessible enough to allow students to build their own escape-room experiences, moving them from consumers of the experience to creators of their virtual escape room universes.

Keywords:

Augmented reality, academic technology, escape rooms, puzzle rooms, riddle rooms, problem solving, critical thinking.