ECGBL Pre-Conference Workshops

Pre Conference Workshop: 02 October 2024

09:00-17:00

Educational Escape Room Workshop

Led by: Dr Panagiotis Fotaris, University of Brighton, UK

Escape rooms are dynamic, team-based games where players collaborate to uncover clues, solve puzzles, and complete tasks within a set time limit to achieve a defined goal. Widely enjoyed by individuals of all ages, escape rooms are increasingly recognized in educational settings for their ability to merge compelling storytelling with engaging gameplay. This integration not only fosters deep immersion but also significantly boosts motivation and engagement, thereby enhancing learning outcomes. Recent studies confirm the effectiveness of educational escape games in promoting active and successful learning experiences.

This interactive workshop offers comprehensive, hands-on training on how to conceptualise, design, execute, and evaluate educational escape rooms. Participants will emerge from the workshop equipped with the skills to create a prototype of an educational escape room, tailored for use in their own educational settings.

Workshop Objectives:

1. Explore Fundamental Concepts: Engage with both tabletop and digital escape rooms to understand the foundational elements and mechanics of escape room design.
2. Develop Design Insight: Gain a thorough understanding of the types of puzzles, themes, and narrative challenges commonly employed in escape rooms and how these can be effectively adapted for educational purposes.
3. Critique and Conceptualise: Learn to critically evaluate the educational potential of escape rooms, identifying how they can be integrated into curriculum to enhance learning and engagement.
4. Apply Design Thinking: Utilise Room2Educ8, a Design Thinking framework, to guide the development, implementation, and testing of an educational escape room prototype, ensuring it is both engaging and pedagogically sound.
5. Innovate with AI Tools: Master prompt engineering techniques and utilise a prompt library to create compelling content and resources for escape rooms using advanced generative AI tools.

Expected Outcomes:

By the conclusion of this workshop, participants will have not only experienced the thrill of escape room gameplay but also designed and playtested their own educational escape room prototype. This prototype will serve as a practical and innovative tool to captivate and educate students, embodying the principles of immersive learning through play.

09:00-14:00

Educational Games Development Workshop

Led by: Ton Spil, Guido Bruinsma , University of Twente & Luuk Collou Saxion University, the Netherlands

This year at ECGBL we will be running an interactive Educational Games Development Workshop, where we plan to make a game in a day!

We will use the Game of Games, developed at the University of Twente to guide this Game Development Workshop.  (http://gamelab20.nl/gog/overview.html)

This event will ask participants to work in groups to come up with a pre-prototype design for an educational game – the specification of which will be provided by the organisers.

We will start with a value proposition game leading to bright ideas that we will develop during the day. To focus the ideas we will work with a general theme (to be announced). Behavioural change will be leading our MDA design. By the end of the session we will have created working prototypes that can be demonstrated during the conference. In the early afternoon they will be tested on fun, flow and feedback mechanisms.

The workshop is open to anyone to attend with any level of experience and we expect to have a multi-national group. Numbers will be limited so early registration is recommended. Participants should bring a laptop or tablet with them. No prior experience is required because we aim to have multi-disciplinary groups.

Workshop Application details