Abstract:

Climate change, and global warming as one of the main indicators, is one of the key challenges of our century. An often neglected pillar is raising awareness and educating youth on this issue, however, educating on climate change brings challenges: it is a complex topic to understand for young people, not only for the huge steps that have to be made among different sectors of society, but also for the nature of climate change itself, seen as a slow progressing force, hardly noticeable and unpredictable. In addition, we are surrounded by misinformation and have difficulties to distinguish credible sources. Especially in the training of future professionals, there is a need to provide from the very beginning both hard and soft skills to address the complexities imposed by climate change. Several studies have suggested that many education efforts might have failed to raise interest and literacy on the topic, and not necessarily because of little information being available, but because of the way information is conveyed. There is a need for interactive and innovative approaches.

Perhaps as a reaction to an environment of increasing “performativity” and “instrumentalism” in education, in the last years we have seen a growing interest in the use of gamification in education: a set of activities and processes to solve problems by applying the characteristics of game elements. A new trend in gamification are digital escape rooms. They can be defined as: “live-action team-based games where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in digital settings in order to accomplish a specific goal (usually escaping from an online room) in a limited time”. The application of (recreational) escape rooms to educational purposes have become more popular as a way to engage people in their learning environment, and encourage both hard skills and soft skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, communication and leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to share a case study for digital and educational escape rooms. “Escape Global Warming” places participants in a small Dutch village located way below sea level: “you have been living in a tight-knit community for a while now, but there’s danger on the horizon. Like every place on earth, Weerwaard will have to face our common enemy: climate change. Your goal will be to save the village from the effects of global warming. To your surprise, you will encounter a lot of challenges and resistance. According to scientists you have just 10 years-time to take the necessary measures to keep society as we know it from falling apart. In this hour, it is up to you to make the right interventions to save Weerwaard from her downfall”. The paper revises the literature on escape rooms for educational purposes, and analyses the communicative and educative elements of “Escape Global Warming” by conducting a qualitative analysis. The opinion from players regarding this type of educational practice is also revealed by conducting interviews after playing the game.

Keywords:

Gamification, escape room, climate change, collaboration.