Kateřina Chudová is a teacher at the Language Centre, Faculty of Law, Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic. She benefits from her seventeen years of experience in teaching adults in a variety of company courses, focusing on implementing life skills and interactive and digital tools to enhance her college classes and make them meaningful. She is interested in learning styles and memory stimulation, which she experiments with in her work with students. Email: katerina.chudova@law.muni.cz

 

Introduction

Revision brings about various emotions among students as well as teachers, mostly those of anxiety and fear and mostly because revision means that a test or exam is soon to come. Students tend to worry about their performance; teachers, on the other hand, are well aware of the precious lesson time they will have to dedicate to reviewing. Revision, however, can actually be enjoyable for both parties and does not have to be that time-consuming.

In this article, I would like to share my approach to revision in my Legal English classes using an online escape game, which can be modified and used for revising any language and skills. This activity is suitable for teachers who feel comfortable and positive about using online tools and technology, who have an analytical mind and logical thinking, and who like a bit of suspense and adventure in their classes.

I have divided the lesson outline in three phases—preliminary preparation, online design, and classroom application. It is important to point out that although the activity does not take that much time in class itself, it requires quite a lot of input from the teacher beforehand. The good news is that once you design your first online escape game subsequent efforts take half the time.

 

Preliminary preparation

An online escape game is an activity during which students have to use their knowledge and skills to solve clues or tasks in order to obtain keys in the form of passwords to be able to get to the end of the game—in other words, to escape a situation.

Having established what an online escape game consists in, let’s have a look at the steps you need to take to design such an activity for your students. I will draw on my experience and practical examples to give you an idea and inspiration:

1. In the first part of the preparatory stage, before you get to the actual online design of the game, you will need a piece of paper or a new text document to take notes.
2. Every escape game should have a story. In my case the story was that of a part-timer working for a law firm with a difficult manager who locked the students up in the archive and would not let them out until they proved their skills. The story should be tailored to your students to make it relevant and absorbing.
3. Decide what you want the students to revise in the game, ideally listing individual topics or areas you want to consolidate. This will give you an idea of how many tasks your students will have to fulfil.
4. Make a list of the individual tasks you want the students to complete, keeping in mind how much time you want the students to spend playing the game in class. I used the escape game in the final session before the exam and I wanted it to take between 45 to 60 minutes, so I designed 16 mini activities or exercises of different length to fit in the time. The concept is basically the same as when you design a revision test. As the scope of my classes is mostly terminology and legal concepts, the activities I included focused on translation, matching, production, search for information, crosswords, scrambled letters, and the like.
5. Think about the keys, i.e. the secret words that will be revealed to the students upon completion of each task and will serve as passwords to get to the following levels. I chose expressions that indicated what the topic of the upcoming task would be or catch phrases and inside jokes that we had come across during the semester to relate to the students and make the whole experience more personal and enjoyable.
6. Choose the name for your escape game to correspond with your story. I opted for a portmanteau “Lawscape” and named my game “Ultimate Lawscape”.
7. Congratulations! You have just created the scenario for your game which will serve you in making sure everything works.

This stage took me approximately an hour because I had created an escape game before and I already knew how to proceed.

 

Online design

There are a number of platforms that offer ready-made solutions for online escape games. I chose genial.ly along with learningapps.org because of my previous positive experience with both websites and, most importantly, the possibility of embedding the content from learningapps.org into genial.ly designs.

1. Go to learningapps.org and design the individual activities using the list you made in the first stage. I recommend saving the activities in a folder dedicated to the escape game to have them in one place. Do not forget to adjust the “task description” of each app using the text that fits the scenario of your game, and also the “Feedback” where you should include the secret word or password as this message will only appear when the students complete the activity successfully.

This is the most time-consuming part of the design since you have to enter a lot of data and follow the scenario.

2. Go to genial.ly and choose a template in “Gamification – Escape games”.
3. Adjust the environment of the template. You can either use the existing game and only adapt the text, or you can delete any unnecessary pages and keep only as many as correspond to the number of learningapps.org activities.
4. Embed the apps from learningapps.org using the embed code from under the activity and the “Insert - </> Others” function in genial.ly. If you have never worked with the platform before, I recommend referring to the “Help” section or video tutorials available on the internet. Once you have inserted the iframes into your escape game, adjust the size of the windows so that they fit the pages.
5. Design the first page of your game describing the story. Here, you can play with the animations to build the suspense and to make students read the instructions properly because they may appear gradually automatically.
6. Design the final page that will inform the students about the successful completion of the quest.
7. Verify the interactivity of the slides, i.e. check all the interactive elements and whether they link to the pages you want them to.
8. Now it is time to “lock” the pages using the icon of a little key next to each page. Refer to your scenario and pay attention to the form of the passwords, especially whether they are lower or upper case. TIP: I wrote “UPPER CASE password” in the “Example text or clue” box to drop a hint.
9. Finally, it is time to test the whole game and correct any flaws you come across. The last step is to generate the link that you will share with your students in class. If you do not want the students to access or share the game after class, it is advisable to duplicate the game, keep the “master version”, and delete the one you used with the students. I recommend duplicating the game even if you want to make it public, just to have a back-up copy in case you accidently click on “delete”.

This stage is quite time-consuming, especially for those who do not have any experience with the abovementioned platforms. Nevertheless, if you are a tech enthusiast, you will use the websites intuitively and even enjoy the creative process! It took me around 5 hours to design and embed 16 activities.

 

Classroom application

The game can be done individually as homework because whatever you publish on genial.ly using the free version is accessible to the public. However, I wanted my students to do this activity in class as I take every opportunity to allow my students to cooperate in teams for them to gain valuable experience and improve their soft skills, and I also wanted to see how much they remembered from the semester.

An example of classroom use:

1. Divide the students in pairs with one laptop with the sound on in each pair (there is usually a jingle at the end of the game and it is a wonderful detail in the classroom when the fastest team gets there and the jingle plays aloud). The students may or may not have the notes from the classes at hand, depending on how strong the students are and whether you want them to refer to the materials.
2. Share the link to the online escape game and tell the students to make it full-screen for a better experience.
3. Monitor the progress and assist weaker students using the game as a learning experience. It is revision after all.
4. Once the first team finishes, the rest of the students keep working and the students that have already finished join the slower teams and assist them. This stage improves peer support and team spirit.
5. When everybody is finished, announce the winners (and even reward them, if you wish) and comment on any particular items in the game that need further explanation or revision.
6. Ask the students for feedback on whether the activity helped them recall the information and/or improve their skills. This will help you elicit whether the activity was efficient and worth repeating in the future.

 

Conclusion

The implementation of an online escape game is quite complex and demanding, especially on the teacher’s time, technical skills and creativity, which makes it a very special teaching tool that can be used only a few times during the academic or school year.

After piloting the escape game in several classes, I collected feedback from the students, asking them whether they thought this kind of activity was a suitable way of revising the subject and whether the game actually helped them reinforce their knowledge. I can happily state that the feedback was positive since the activity catered for the students’ interests and reflected the current popularity of escape rooms in real life. An online escape game may thus be considered an efficient revision tool as it is engaging and competitive and allows students to consolidate their knowledge and get an overall idea of what the syllabus of the course involved. It also works as a team-building activity, enabling students to assist and guide each other.

 

Useful links

https://genial.ly/

https://learningapps.org/

 

Please check the Pilgrims f2f courses at Pilgrims website.

Please check the Pilgrims online courses at Pilgrims website.