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Together We Stand, Divided We Fall: High-tech Instruments and Multimedia in Escape Rooms
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Conference Paper not in Proceedings
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Published
Recommended form of citation (APA)
Steinbach, A. (et al.) (2023, Novmeber). «Together We Stand, Divided We Fall: High-tech Instruments and Multimedia in Escape Rooms" (Case Study). Paper presentet at EAPRIL 2023, Dublin, November, 22-24, 2023.
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metadata only (bibliographisch)
Topic PHSG
Mathematische, Naturwissenschaftliche und Technische Bildung
Subjects
Fields of Science and Technology (OECD)
Education, general (including training, pedagogy, didactics)
Natural Sciences
Abstract
«For it is not two doctors that associate for exchange, but a doctor and a farmer; or in general people who are different and unequal, but these must be equated», wrote Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. Innovative ideas emerge in heterogenic communities. No science has developed intrinsically on its own. Moreover, our global crises cannot be solved without cooperation across different cultures and worldviews. The ability to work in a team, to deal with diversity and ambiguity, needs to be practiced early, ideally in school.
The Berzelius project focuses on experiments with borrowable high-tech instruments to boost STEM capacities in secondary school. Around the instruments, an interdisciplinary team produces vibrant multimedia lab journals explaining theory, instrument, set-up etc. Moreover, the project offers teacher trainings and comprehensive support for Matura works.
To foster collaboration and team spirit, we migrate our high-tech instruments in escape rooms (ERs). Intertwined with multimedia journals, we weave them into a web of puzzles and riddles that we condense into stunning stories. The participants need all their senses and must collaborate to set up equipment, solve riddles, redeem jokers, investigate, etc. In this case study, we present several ER scenarios that we brainstorm and discuss with participants.
The Berzelius project focuses on experiments with borrowable high-tech instruments to boost STEM capacities in secondary school. Around the instruments, an interdisciplinary team produces vibrant multimedia lab journals explaining theory, instrument, set-up etc. Moreover, the project offers teacher trainings and comprehensive support for Matura works.
To foster collaboration and team spirit, we migrate our high-tech instruments in escape rooms (ERs). Intertwined with multimedia journals, we weave them into a web of puzzles and riddles that we condense into stunning stories. The participants need all their senses and must collaborate to set up equipment, solve riddles, redeem jokers, investigate, etc. In this case study, we present several ER scenarios that we brainstorm and discuss with participants.
Additional Information
EXTENDED ABSTRACT:
Innovative ideas emerge in communities whose members are diverse and different. «For it is not two doctors that associate for exchange, but a doctor and a farmer; or in general people who are different and unequal, but these must be equated», wrote the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. The whole is more than the sum of the parts, teaches us the holistic thesis dominating evolutionary biology and sociology. And the history and nature of science instructs us that no science develops intrinsically out of itself. Rather sovereignty of interpretation and obsession of truth lead into Beadrillard’s «hell of the same» where diversity and innovation hardly flourish, as the approximately 2000 yearlong dominance of the four-element theory with the mere discovery of only two elements – bismuth and arsenic – impressively proves. The Swiss writer Peter Bichsel never got tired of mentioning that the common things do not impress him, that common things rather put him to sleep, that they easily lead to self-righteousness. The focus is not so much on what unites, but on what divides. And it is impossible to imagine beauty without the different: all real beauty is foreign. Monocultures are hostile to life – not only in agriculture. And we all agree that the multiple global crises cannot be solved without efficient cooperation across disparate cultures, systems and world views. All this requires interdisciplinarity and teamwork, which translates into the ability to deal with diversity and ambiguity in the world. In the question of the atomic structure of matter the two pre-Socratic natural philosophers Heraclitus und Parmenides were on opposite irreconcilable sides: while the first affirmed being und change, the latter denied them. Beautiful paradox! The first conclusion is obvious from our senses – we call it empiricism –, the latter apprehended by the intellect, – we call it rationalism. Then, it was the turn of Democritus and his teacher Leucippus. Democritus, a much-travelled universal scholar, combined the two positions in one. So simple, so great, so brave. His theory took thousands of years to push through. Nowadays his ideas, at least in name, are known to everybody as the atomic theory. In this context, he got famous for one of the most stunning quotes of science: «Nothing exists except atoms and empty spaces.” His theory was rather the result of a dialectical process – i.e., thesis, antitheses syntheses – than luck, as the philosophers Friedrich Hegel and Bertrand Russell put it. The beauty of Democritus was that he united many cultures and world views in one and the same person. He also was convinced that the greatest happiness could be found in the pursuit of knowledge.
The «Berzelius project» tries to transcend as much of this «happiness-through-pursuit-of-knowledge» philosophy as possible on STEM students in secondary school. For this, the project aims at fueling students’ sense of wonder and excitement by offering an outstanding, borrowable high-tech instrument park that is generally far beyond school reach. Around the instruments a team of highly skilled chemistry, physics and biology educators, texters and multimedia specialists (Aristotle’s doctors and famers!) elaborate dedicated theme-oriented and multi-faceted multimedia laboratory journals (MLJs) with experiment instructions using high-class videos, graphics, graphic novels, audios and much more. At workshops or Tecdays in schools, the team regularly presents the high-tech instruments to motivate the students for experimental science and to go for a Matura thesis in one of the STEM subjects.
In the last years, the project intensively collaborated with various schools, offering teacher trainings, a widespread selection of Matura thesis themes and comprehensive instrument and multimedia support. Every year around 20 Matura theses are elaborated with our instruments, some of them that excellent that they are awarded. Although the workshops serve their purpose, we think that our combined high-tech-instrument-multimedia approach where student actually hover in pairs from one experiment station to the next can be significantly improved by spicing it with sciencetainment, gamification and a contextual storytelling. In other words: we plant to migrate our high-tech instruments and the corresponding multimedia journals into educational STEM Escape rooms (ERs).
The Cambride English Dictionary defines an escape room as «a game where people are locked into a room and have to find a way to escape by finding clues.» Main aspect of introducing escape rooms in the classroom is the high level of immersion and the experience of working in groups. Further arguments of heterogenic groups and variety have been intensively mentioned above. Escape rooms in science are widespread and very successful, particularly when challenging experiments can be integrated, all the more when considering breath-taking high-tech instrumentation from chemistry, biology, physics, medicine and forensics. The multimedia journals would be the platform to host the ER, to design the background story and the riddles. Pageflow, the tool behind the multimedia journals, is ideally suited for this. First all our information for handling the high-tech instruments is there, second, it has an intuitive technology, built-in features and tools for videos, podcasts, links and animations.
Here, the rough concept: In all rooms, clues must be deduced, that are woven into a web of puzzles and riddles that we condense into several stunning stories. To solve the riddle many very different tasks must be solved, both theoretical and practical using multimedia und high-tech instruments. The knowledge from one room is required for the new task in the next room by using keys and locks. At the beginning every group can select several types of jokers for buying clues in case they are stuck with a riddle. In every room there is at least one instrument – sometimes with other useless instruments as distractors –, sometimes built up correctly, sometimes with incorrect wiring, sometimes with a missing part (that must be found), sometimes already stowed in its transport box. We present several game design aspects, storytelling, puzzle structures and the combined use of high-tech instrumentation (with live demo) and multimedia journals for hands-on and mind-on activities.
| Name of the event | Place of the event | Start date of the event | End date of the event |
EAPRIL 2023 | Dublin | November 22, 2023 | November 24, 2023 |
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metadata only (bibliographisch)
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All rights reserved
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