1311. Incorporating an “Escape Room” Game Design in Infectious Diseases Instruction

Abstract

BackgroundAs health professions education evolves toward active learning environments, interest in using games as an educational tool is increasing. One contemporary commercial game that has design potential for learning activities is an “escape” or “breakout” room. Escape rooms are live-action games where teams of players work to achieve a common goal in a set amount of time. Limited literature is available assessing this type of gaming format for education design. This study investigated the design and implementation of an escape room learning activity in a third-year pharmacy infectious disease elective course at the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy.MethodsDuring a Gram-positive antimicrobial resistance module, third-year pharmacy students participated in both patient case-based instruction and an escape room learning activity. Three IRB-approved surveys were distributed electronically to students; the first was completed prior to class and functioned as a standard teaching tool to assess mastery of content based on pre-assigned reading and previous coursework. Two surveys were completed after the session to assess knowledge and perceptions gained during each learning activity. Students answered multiple-choice knowledge-based questions and then responded to five statements using a Likert scale from 1 to 7 (1 = Not at all, 4 = Somewhat, and 7 = Very much) to indicate perceptions of each instructional activity.ResultsNineteen students participated in the study. The mean correct scores for knowledge-based assessment were 90.5% in the pre-class survey, 82.1% in the post-case survey, and 90.5% in the post-escape room survey. There was an overall positive perception of both learning activities based on results of the survey questions. The escape room learning activity was preferred by 18 of 19 students (94.7%), but only 11 of 19 (57.9%) indicated they learned better from the escape room.ConclusionThis study illustrates an escape room designed to meet lecture learning objectives is a feasible active learning technique. While students demonstrated knowledge gained from the activity and indicated positive perceptions, this approach warrants further evaluation.Disclosures All authors: No reported disclosures.

Examining the Use of an Educational Escape Room for Teaching Programming in a Higher Education Setting

“…When compared with the computer lab sessions performed in the course, students declared that they prefer the escape room over a lab session (M = 4.5, SD = 0.9) and that the learning outcomes are somewhat higher in the former (M = 3.7, SD = 1.3). These results are consistent with previous research works [14], [16], which established that students feel more engaged and obtain slightly better learning outcomes in educational escape rooms than in other practical activities. In view of these results, course staff of programming courses at higher education institutions should consider replacing some hands-on activities, such as lab sessions, with well-designed educational escape rooms.…”

“…This study also found that students preferred the conducted educational escape room over traditional computer lab sessions and that they perceived the learning outcomes somewhat higher in the former. Previous works have provided similar findings [14], [16], although this specific comparison was not addressed by any of them. Another novel and relevant finding of this study is that, despite the fact that female students showed less prior interest in games, they enjoyed the escape room as much as their male counterparts.…”

“…Because of the novelty of the concept of escape room, there is a paucity of research examining the use of educational escape rooms as well as the application of non-educational escape rooms in educational settings. There are a number of cases of demonstrated success in conducting educational escape rooms in higher education in the fields of nursing [9], [10], medicine [11], [12], pharmacy [13]- [16], physiotherapy [17], chemistry [18], computer networks [19], and mathematics [20]. However, to the knowledge of the authors, no works have been reported in the computer programming field.…”

Escape Education: A Systematic Review on Escape Rooms in Education

“…Other case studies describe students developing escape rooms in order to foster design skills (Li, Chou, Chen, & Chiu, 2018;Ma, Chuang, & Lin, 2018). Escape rooms have been designed to foster domain specific skills and knowledge, such as nursing (Adams, Burger, Crawford, & Setter, 2018;Brown, Darby, & Coronel, 2019), medicine (Cotner, Smith, Simpson, Burgess, & Cain, 2018), pharmacy (Cain, 2019;Eukel, Frenzel, & Cernusca, 2017), physiotherapy (Carrión et al, 2018), chemistry (Dietrich, 2018), physics (Vörös & Sárközi, 2017), computer science (Ho, 2018), mathematics (Arnal et al, 2019), history (Rouse, 2017), and English (López, 2019) or to support the development of generic skills (Craig, Ngondo, Devlin, & Scharlach, 2019). Teachers appreciated the diversity of content-related activities, the need for collaboration and the engagement shown by students.…”

“…Only three studies in the medical domain actually measured the achievements on the learning goals by means of a pre-and post-knowledge test. In addition, one of the studies compared the learning outcomes of the ER with their regular case activity on infectious diseases (Cotner et al, 2018). Three surveys were sent to each student.…”