A lecturer in education at Stellenbosch University (SU) with an innate curiosity and interest in innovative learning has challenged her student teachers to explore the world of gamification to bring educational material alive in their classrooms.

Most learners will tell you that there's nothing fun about assessments. But what about assessments that take place in an online escape room where the questions are clues and only correct answers will open the door? Delecia Davids, a lecturer in SU's Faculty of Education and who has an interest in design-based learning, is pushing the boundaries of conventional assessment by promoting gamification as a teaching tool.

The idea was borne shortly before the pandemic of 2020 when Davids was inspired by a project called “The deeper learning puzzle bus", developed by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University in response to findings that standardised tests seldom measure important skills such as critical thinking, collaboration and communication. The bus is in fact a delivery truck that has been reconfigured as a mobile escape room. It travels around to various schools where children can actively engage with learning material and solve clues to exit the escape room.

Intrigued, Davids had just started considering a similar application in local classrooms when the pandemic hit, and schools and universities were forced to close. So, Davids had to adapt and consider ways an escape room could work in an online space, and whether she could find a way to encourage her students to collaborate when they were unable to physically interact. “The intention at the time, was to think about how to help students design something similar for their subject specialisation." She used Google Slides and a Google form base for the escape room, and embedded a timer, puzzles and clues with hyperlinks. She admits to rigorously testing her escape room before sharing it with her students. “I was confronted by my own vulnerability about technology. Before I let my students experience the room I had designed, I sat and tested my links. I learned with my students."

She then demonstrated the concept to her students before asking them to design their own escape rooms. They were also encouraged to test their designs in the educational space by incorporating them into the curriculum. Davids admits that when presented with the escape room challenge, her students were less than enthusiastic. They were particularly concerned about getting to grips with the technology to create the online assessment, and how they would find the time to incorporate these assessments into their lessons. However, once they had experimented with the escape room and designed their own in groups, they could see how effective it could be as an assessment tool.

Annie Thomson, a fourth-year education student, has enjoyed great success in her Grade 4 classroom with her online escape room. She used a Microsoft PowerPoint platform so that her learners would be able to access the game even with connectivity issues. Her learners had to complete an assessment activity at the end of their lesson segment and Thomson says she used the escape room “to make the lesson more interesting and involve some aspect of learning, not just revision." As the assessment happened to fall on Harry Potter Day, Thomson's game was based on a Hogwarts theme and set in Professor Sprout's herbology class. Only once learners had successfully answered the questions and unlocked the clues, were they able to exit, thus completing the assessment.

Final-year student Tiffany Reynolds notes that gamification works particularly well for children in the intermediate phase, from Grade 4 to 7, who tend to be resistant to learning. “This shows them that knowledge is fun and desirable." She says teachers need to keep learning with their learners. “We had to embrace the wrestle and learn (how to apply the technology) ourselves." James de la Cruz, also a final-year-student, says that while finding the time to include games into the curriculum will be a challenge, he does see the benefits of incorporating them into his lesson plans.

The objective was to shift students away from agnostic teaching methods – where they only teach what they know, explains Davids. “We need to build creative confidence in teachers." This is why it was important for her to model the use of the application herself, while showing her student teachers that making mistakes are a necessary part of the process. “The most exciting aspect of the whole journey was learning with the students and seeing them go beyond what was expected." Michaela Chetty, another one of Davids' final-year students, says: “Now we can take what we have been given (the tools to include games) and revolutionise it." The gamification of learning encourages greater engagement, and it is ongoing process of learning for teachers and their classes.

Although still very much in the early phase, SU's online assessment approach has caught the eye of educational publishers. “As a product, the escape room assessment can be commercialised or provided as open source to schools," says Davids. Her interest in this field is ongoing, and she recently presented a poster named “Using escape rooms to develop the digital competencies of Natural Science pre-service teachers" with Dr Anthea Jacobs, an academic advisor at the SU's Centre for Teaching and Learning, at the 30^th International Conference on Learning in Brazil.

Davids also co-authored a book chapter with Elzette le Roux, an academic advisor in online learning at the Centre for Learning Technologies at SU, on the conceptualisation of the digital escape room as an assessment strategy, which will be published soon.

Caption:

Final-year students in SU's Faculty of Education Annie Thomson, Michaela Chetty, Tiffany Reynolds and James de la Cruz with lecturer Delecia Davids, in front of Davids' virtual escape room.