BreakoutEDU: Helping students break out of their comfort zones

Abstract

If you'd walked by Professor Susan Detwiler's Writing and Critical Inquiry (WCI) classrooms at the University at Albany-SUNY on September 7, you would have seen something rather unusual: two teams of students huddled around tables, preoccupied with locked boxes and an assortment of other materials. Engaged in animated, yet hushed, conversations to keep the other team from overhearing, the students puzzled over cryptic messages and secret codes, hoping to unlock the box and reveal what was inside. Some of the materials on the table provided clues, others turned out to be red herrings.The students were working with BreakoutEDU, 1 an immersive games platform. Building on the growing popularity of escape rooms, which challenge players to "break out" of their surroundings using clues and puzzles, this collaborative team-building experience can be applied in educational settings to meet a range of learning objectives.After attending a conference session about BreakoutEDU this past summer, Trudi Jacobson, head of information literacy, returned full of ideas about how it might be used to facilitate student learning. The idea was eagerly embraced by her two colleagues at a planning meeting for the fall semester's jointly taught class sessions: Susan Detwiler, member of the WCI faculty, and Kelsey O'Brien, information literacy librarian and liaison to the WCI Program. Coteaching modelWCI is a required seminar for first-year students, in which students learn the thinking, writing, and reading mindsets and strategies necessary for their academic careers and beyond. These objectives dovetail with the university's general education information literacy requirements, and so over the last several years, the three of us have worked closely together to strengthen students' research skills and deepen their understanding of how to engage in academic inquiry.At the center of both the WCI course and the information literacy program is developing students' practice of inquiry. As outlined by program standards, WCI students complete a sequence of three major assignments. First, they write to explore experiences or phenomena in the world. Then students write an analysis of a relevant issue or question that arises from the first assignment, incorporating scholars' interpretation of that issue or question. In the final paper, students write to join in the appropriate scholarly or broader conversation of that issue or question. This carefully structured sequence of Susan Detwiler is a member of the WCI faculty, email: sdetwiler@albany.edu, Trudi Jacobson is head of information literacy, email: tjacobson@albany.edu, and Kelsey O'Brien is information literacy librarian and liaison to the WCI Program at the University at Albany-SUNY,

Flip It and Break It: Using Flipped Lessons and Breakouts to Energize Learning

“…While most of the locations for the escape games were in classrooms (78.9%), libraries were the second most popular location (Fotaris & Mastoras, 2019, p. 239). This correlates with the growing amount of literature discussing the use of breakout lessons by librarians in information literacy instruction (Detwiler et al, 2018;Lewallen, 2019).…”

“…Breakouts are useful tools for working with students on developing inquiry skills that will be needed in higher education classrooms (Detwiler et al, 2018). They have to be persistent and think outside the box to solve the clues in the puzzle.…”

Gamifying Instruction and Engaging Students With Breakout EDU

“…The instruction sessions were a collaborative effort between two librarians and a faculty member and were unusual in that we had the opportunity to teach the students over several class periods. The Breakout EDU session therefore sought to introduce concepts that we would be revisiting throughout the semester, such as inquiry, metacognition, and the growth mindset, and to help students bond with their classmates (Detwiler, Jacobson, & O’Brien, 2018).…”

Educational Escape Rooms as an Active Learning Tool for Teaching Telecommunications Engineering

“…Educational escape rooms are game based learning activities, where concepts to be learnt or revised are embedded within escape room puzzles. Currently educational escape rooms have been run in physically setup rooms [17], as online simulations [18], as a tabletop 'lockbox' experience [19] or using an electronic decoder/validation device [20] [21].…”