Open This Box: Leveraging the Popularity of Escape Rooms to Create an Engaging Library Instruction Session
Open This Box: Leveraging the Popularity of Escape Rooms to Create an Engaging Library Instruction Session
Open This Box: Leveraging the Popularity of Escape Rooms to Create an Engaging Library Instruction Session
By Amber Wilson and Jessica Riedmueller
Abstract
“As any library instructor knows, maintaining student interest in a one-shot library instruction session is a compromisebetween education and entertainment. Library scavenger hunts attempt to strike this balance. However, most non-librarian createdscavenger hunts fail to teach the proper information literacy skills and place a heavy burden on the librarians at the reference desk. This results in an ineffective, passive learning experience. In response to requests for these type of “entertaining” activities, wedesigned a library session that relied instead on interactive engagement with the library’s resources. We struck upon the idea of anescape room due to its popularity and reputation as a fun challenge. As Margino (2013) observes, “Game-based learning in libraries presents a solution to facilitating student’s engagement with instruction content, self-discovery of information, and learning throughtrial and error” (p. 334). We were surprised to find that many of the same critical thinking and analysis skills useful in a commercialescape room overlap with the skills that college students need to become efficient and information literate researchers. We built our scenario so that students work through the research process by solving puzzles using library resources, finding the different types ofacademic sources that they would theoretically use to write a research paper.”
Reference
Wilson, A., & Riedmueller, J. (2022). Open This Box: Leveraging the Popularity of Escape Rooms to Create an Engaging Library Instruction Session. Retrieved May 13, 2022, from https://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=loexconf2017
Keyword
Education, escape rooms, library, instruction session, students, research