Process
After completing a few Escape Rooms I decided to use the game techniques and apply them to eLearning. Each 'room' in the game can be adapted to a different type of gamified eLearning.
The Filing Cabinet
The first room uses some simple true or false questioning a staple of eLearning. Answering these questions set a combination of the filing cabinet. Any instructional design is going to use some fact based questions at some point and this is an example of how that can be incorporated into a gamified design.
The build itself for this is straight-forward with variables set on the question responses to determine the different outcomes.
The Seance Method
This is probably the most escape room like of all the room; this is the only room that you can leave with an incorrect answer and that can have repercussions further down the line.
The concept of using a drag and drop interaction to 'weigh' items can be adapted to all sorts of training situations. Anything where making comparisons between ideas/concepts/objects or even a lesson about the weights of objects.
The Map Room
The map room requires the user to start mapping different pieces of information to a whole. Like a lot of escape room info can be picked up and then applied to deduce other facts. In an instructional design sense you can apply to any situation that requires reasoning from a set of facts.
To create this is a matter of syncing the correct layers and getting the text entry fields to interact at various different levels.
The Casino
In terms of the escape room game this was the more complex to write design and build. A casino fits nicely with the themes of detective noir and gaming that this project was designed to showcase. Finding a way to incorporate that in teh project was a little ore difficult. In the end it is a case of connecting series of patterns to reveal the end secret. When using this in a pure eLearning sense then it could adapted to anything where spotting a method or sequence needs to be evaluated.
In this build the dice mechanic that needed to be random was the main challenge of the build and shows the value of being part of an eLearning community. The eLearning Heroes community had a dice mechanic available for reuse which was reworked to match the required colour coding that forms the clue needed to progress. With Articulate products the active community really does help especially when you need a shortcut for a bigger project.
The Electric Circus
Setting a user against the clock is a fun way to add gamification to eLearning. But not one to be used lightly; it can cause accessibility issues and so needs to be used carefully. In this case as a game is being played with no impact on anybody's learning or employment in can be used. The room itself can be applied to any logical steps or even exactly as is to show how electrical circuits work.
To build is actually a fairly simple matter and the challenge here is the actual design, making a look and feel of complex circuitry that can be use by someone with no electrical knowledge. Once this is done the rest is switches, staes and layers.
The password room and the run
The password submission is a simple text entry field. Anyone that gets that far is unlikely to not be able to finish and it really acts as a ending to the game. The running section is an add on that allows us to explore Storyline's ability to mimic gaming. To make this more applicable to learning the addition of stop where questions need to be answered could be added or the more questions answered during the build up providing more time and or shortcuts in the game could be added. The game itself would have more complexity; platforms to jump on, a diversity of objects to avoid, in order to be used as a real eLearning module.