We wear culture! (LS-PL-111)
A cultural Escape Room
We wear culture! – is a title of interdisciplinary classes about the cultural diversity of the world prepared in the form of a didactic Escape Room based on the rules of the game. Through the theme of costumes that we wear during holidays, or in everyday life, or admire in historical portraits, you can improve knowledge about multicultural education, present forms of action and ways of thinking of different societies.
Virtual puzzles
The “We wear culture” Escape Room is a thematic room of puzzles prepared in the gamification form. Within a certain time limit, participants divided into teams have to solve the prepared tasks in order to get out of the virtual-locked real room.
The basis for the task – opening a symbolic electronic padlock – is the close cooperation of all the groups working on solving the prepared puzzles. Basic knowledge of technology, perceptiveness, attention, conversation, perseverance are needed to complete the tasks to the end. Depending on the specificity of the prepared tasks, between five and twenty people can work in one room.
A stroll in Versailles
It is important to create an atmosphere of fun and emotions connected with solving many unusual tasks. The main goal is to shape social skills, logical thinking, broaden the perspective of seeing phenomena and perceiving processes not always in a typical school style. The planned tasks are of mixed – analogue – digital character.
We hold the class in a single room. Participants, divided into five groups, solve a total of 30 puzzles. The topics of the puzzles are: regional and historical costumes, Versailles costumes, textiles and raw materials and design. Each team performs different tasks with similar themes. The execution of successive tasks allows to obtain information. When we combine the solutions of individual groups, it makes up the final solution.
ICT and culture
We use ICT tools when introducing the Escape Room, hiding puzzles in the form of QR codes (tasks prepared in the Learning Apps application), the use of mobile application, making the tasks available in an interactive whiteboard, a thematic poster, determining the answer using a robot (Ozobot), as well as during a virtual walk in the space of the Palace in Versailles.
Thanks to a simple application prepared in Scratch we virtually closed the room. Moreover, after determining the correct answers, it allows the participants to guess the motto of the famous French cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Guessing this proves the high competence of all participants in the game. At the same time, it opens the virtual padlock and finalizes the task.
Teacher Escape Room workshop
In June 2019, we presented this scenario to teachers of IT, Mathematics, Science and Humanities subjects during the Computer Science and Society conference organized by the Computer Assisted Education and Information Technology Centre in Warsaw. Participating teachers took part in a workshop that lasted one hour.
Would you like to know more about this learning scenario? You can download it below:
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The original featured image used to illustrate this article belongs to the public domain.