Seed Project Autumn 2021 : Escape Room icebreaker

Responsible: Guro Lilledal Andersen

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During a Bachelor’s degree, students will do group work in several courses. Knowing how to perform effective group work is also a skill the students will take advantage of in future jobs. However, first-year university students have different experiences with group work from school. Therefore, I wanted to arrange an activity at the beginning of the term where the students had an opportunity to discuss what characterises good and effective group work.

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In this iEarth Seed Project, I made an Escape Room inspired activity for the first-year students in the geology and physical geography introductory course GEO1110 at UiO. The students had to work as a group and solve four puzzles as fast as possible to win. The puzzles were inspired by themes in GEO1110.

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After the winner had been announced, we had a workshop where the students reflected on how the collaboration in the group had been. They also discussed which experiences they would take with them from the Escape Room activity into the group work later in the course. The students agreed that the most essential thing they would do next time would be to make a plan before starting to solve the task. They also pointed out that they would evaluate the different group members’ strengths and divide the work.

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While doing this project, I experienced that making Escape Room puzzles from scratch for the first time takes time. I will recommend that others who try out a similar activity ask a group of people to try out the puzzles in advance to see how much time it takes to solve them.

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I was inspired to do this project by the workshop “What can escape rooms teach us about effective group work?” held by Ruben Thormodsæter, Jonathan Soule and Sehoya Cotner from bioCEED at the UNIS Learning Forum 2021.

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