Using online Escape Rooms for summative assessment

Following O’Brien (2021), I created a OneNote online Escape Room as a summative assessment for 1st year students. Ten password-protected rooms containing a variety of puzzles were created based on weekly lecture content, to help Geoffrey the air particle make his way from the lungs to the mouth. The puzzles were mostly designed by prompting and correcting ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2023), an idea gained from attending the Escape Rooms in Education Showcase 2023. This resulted in anagrams, riddles, and T or F statements based
on the teaching content being assessed. Other tasks required students to link out to Flippity, another idea gained from attending the Escape Rooms in Education Showcase 2023. The Escape Room was piloted with colleagues with the same content knowledge as the
student participants, resulting in some changes to complex puzzles.
The assessment was an on-campus, timed activity. The timing of the activity was hard to determine, so a flexible approach was taken. For this initial run, the students were told that they would pass the assessment when they ‘escaped’ and that there would be many
hints to help them successfully reach the end. Hints ranged depending on the need of the student with some requiring promptin g from the tutor invigilating (a guide had been prepared in advance), but answers were never provided. For this first run, there was no real
way for students to fail the assessment. This led to the biggest challenge going forward. If there is no way to fail, then how would students be motivated to study if hints were easily available?
In this session, I would like to demonstrate my Escape Room and invite ideas on how to manage assessments using Escape Rooms