Engage Your Learners with a Pop-Up Escape Room

By Tracey Stokely

Have you ever been to an escape room where you are locked inside a room with a small group of people who you do or don’t know and try to “escape” within the time limit? There are more and more turning up in cities and tourist areas around the country. Well, a pop-up escape room is not exactly one of those.

A pop-up escape room is based on the same concept as a regular escape room, but can be conducted anywhere, thus the “pop-up”. You can hold it in a training room, open space, or even at a bar. It’s not that hard and you can create one!

Background

I attended GamiCon in the fall of 2018. The first night, they held a pop-up escape room in the upstairs of a bar in Chicago. Imagine about 100 people in a very small bar area. It got hot, and it was crowded, but it didn’t matter. This was a game, and we all got so involved that, we were not concerned with the fact that our dinner was late that night. We were sweating, and at the one-hour mark, no teams had unlocked the “escape room” yet. We were totally engaged, competitive and quickly learning more about our new teammates who we had never met before.

As GamiCon continued over the next few days, it was amazing to see how many pop-up escape room team members hung out together for the rest of the conference. Apparently, those who “escape” together (or try) stay together. A special shout out here to Michiel van Eunen of the Netherlands, who designed and ran the pop-up escape room that night.
Later that night, I thought, wow! I could create one of these at my company, and I know just how I would use it. So, I did.

Three weeks later, I held a pilot with 18 of my co-workers trying it out. They loved it. The game worked and ran smoothly. We now use this pop-up escape room in the afternoon of Day 2 of our onboarding program for new hires. We added the game in January 2019, and as of the end of June, we’ve had over 400 new hires (we’re a growing company) participate in our “Pop-Up Escape Room Challenge.”

We use this pop-up escape room activity to engage learners, review what they’ve learned in the last day and a half, see how they work in small teams, and to get to know others in their training class who they haven’t worked with much since starting the day before. The learners love it.

Above: teams from different pop-up escape room challenges.

Survey comments from New Hire Onboarding classes:
          “I LOVED the escape room challenge.” – new hire learner
          “I really enjoyed the escape game portion. I would love to see more similar interactive pop up               experiences throughout our learning course.” – new hire learner
          “Everything was great, especially the escape room challenge.” – new hire learner

What Is a Pop-Up Escape Room, and How Does It Work?

Learners in teams of four to six (ideally) work together to figure out “Clue Words” to get hints to figure out a 10-digit unlock code. The first team to enter the correct “unlock code” to unlock the “door” wins. Sounds easy doesn’t it? If you make games too easy, they are not fun. You have to make the game somewhat hard, yet, not too hard and you need to keep your time limit in mind.

The pop-up escape room I created, involved 10 clue objects that are placed strategically around a room. The room type and shape doesn’t matter; just about any room could be used. Just make it big enough to hold your entire class. Learners, on teams, try to figure out the clue words from the clue objects. Then, one learner per team types their guess at a clue word into an “app” (website) on their phone to see if they got the word correct. If they do type in an actual clue word, they get a hint for one of the 10-digits in the unlock code. Once they figure out all 10 digits, they enter their guess into the facilitator’s laptop and “unlocks the door.” The first team who does this wins.

Clue Words and Clue Objects

One of the most important things in this game is picking the right clue words and finding clue objects that will work with them. For example, if you’re teaching a course on team building, you could use a photo of a sports team. The clue word would be “team”. That would be an easy one. However, you want to have a mixture of easy and hard clue objects. Maybe another clue word for that course could be “gap.” You could have a photo or statuette of a person with a gap in their teeth. Much harder! All of the clue words should have something to do with the related course or event you’re pairing it with. For example, one of our clue words for our onboarding program is “culture.” For this, I took a household item that had nothing to do with anything and taped a URL to it that was hidden. The URL went to the “Karma Chameleon” video on YouTube by Culture Club. The learners “got it” once they saw the video, especially since this word was used a lot in their training over the last two days.

“Apps”

I needed two “apps” for this game. The first app lets learners type clue words on their phones to see if they were correct. If so, then the “app” would then provide hints for the unlock code. The second app lets the team enter the final unlock code once they have figured it out. I used Articulate Storyline to create both of these. I designed the “Clue Entry App” to provide hints if one of the 10 clue words (not case sensitive) was entered into the “app.” I placed the web output from Storyline on a public-facing server. We use Amazon Web Services, so I added it there. During the instructions time, I provided both a URL and a QR code that gets the learners to the “app” quickly via their phone’s browser.

Clue Entry app

The other “app” lets the team type in their guess at the 10-digit unlock code. I used Articulate Storyline to set up the simple logic and then added the SCORM package to our LMS. The facilitator of the game makes available his/her laptop in the “room” for teams to use. If a team enters the correct unlock code, the door opens and presents a message that let the team know that they have won.

Unlock Code Entry app

Hints and Worksheets

At the beginning of the activity, we provide a packet to each team that has the rules, two “hint coupons,” and a worksheet that can help them when trying to figure out the clue words and unlock code. If teams give the facilitator a “hint coupon”, the facilitator gives them a hint, but not an answer.

Debriefing

After the escape room has been “unlocked”, the game is over. We provide a certificate to each of the members of the winning team. Also, we typically hold a short debriefing of the game that centers around how each group worked as a team. For our onboarding classes, we talk about how they will have to collaborate with people from various departments, just like they did in the pop-up escape room challenge.

Fun, engagement, and a review of key training words are always achieved in our pop-up escape room.

Ponder this, what training do you have in which a pop-up escape room would work?

ADDENDUM: We won BEST MOBILE SOLUTION at DemoFest for this activity and our activity’s apps at the 2019 DevLearn Conference!

The 1960’s called, they want their training back!

How are you designing your training these days? Does it look like training did in the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s? Times have changed, keep up. Get your training up-to-date! It should not only look good, but it should be effective. Train for today’s world, not yesterday’s.

There is no excuse to be using old methodologies, old design and old technology for training. For example, are you still using screen-based training for software training? Screen-based training went out of style in the 80’s! Studies have shown that task-based training is by far more effective than screen-based training.

Those of us in the business of Learning and Development strive to help learners learn. But sometimes we might be the impediments to orchestrating learning. The more poorly-designed training and eLearning out there, the worse it looks for our whole industry. The more crap training we put out there, the more people avoid attending training or going through eLearning. Some have started resisting “pushed” learning like the plague. Don’t give training and eLearning a bad rap, redesign your old stuff.

People like Julie Dirksen, Michael Allen, Clark Quinn, and Will Thalheimer started preaching this stuff when they wrote their Serious eLearning Manifesto back in 2014. They worked hard to get people on-board in order to produce more effective training. Kudos to them for bringing this to light. Part of effectiveness of learning is producing training for today and not yesterday.

Just when I see so much good and progress in our industry of learning and development, then I see so many examples of careless design and training thrown together and they call it training. Poor design and totally ineffective. Stop wasting people’s precious time. Come on, let’s all get on-board and turn this around.

The Time Has Come – eLearning!

A case for changing from e-Learning to eLearning.

Language is such a fluid thing. It’s constantly changing. It never stands still. In France, they have the Académie française that has the official authority on usages, vocabulary and grammar of the French language and to publish official dictionaries. These are basically a group of people who sit down and determine the use of words and how words change over time. We don’t have anything like that here in the United States. But the fact is, we have words that change over time—especially the ones that are used more and more frequently. For example, take email. Originally, it started out as e mail. Then it morphed into e-mail and now it’s changed into a “closed compound” word by eliminating the hyphen and becoming email.

Per The Chicago Manual of Style, 15^th edition, there is a “trend toward closed compounds.” They go on to say, “With frequent use, open or hyphenated compounds tend to become closed. …” Another example of this is “on-line” which has become, over time, “online.”

Apple takes this concept to a whole different level with their iAnything! They have their iPad, iPhone, iWatch and maybe tomorrow’s iLunchBox. They don’t hyphenate it. They imply high-tech with the use of a small case “i” in front of their products. We have already taken learning into high-tech and have been doing this for years and years. I’m not implying we should have iLearning; that will be held for Apple to fight for that one, I’m certain. But let’s update this overly-hyphenated word, eLearning, and update it for this millennium.

eLearning has been around long enough. Many have already switched to eLearning, like Lynda.com and eLearning Magazine. Meanwhile, there are those who use both and those who are stuck with the omni-present hyphen. I say it’s high time we move forward to eLearning. Enough time has passed; it’s time to put the hyphen to rest.

The train has left the station, so get on board. Besides, there’s also mLearning to contend with. But that will have to be for another day.

Captivate 8: Responsive or Scalable Software Simulation?

The process for creating software simulations has greatly changed over the past few years. Today most companies need to be creating software simulations that can be viewed on a variety of devices, including mobile. You might as well forget Flash output anymore.

Two exciting outputs for software simulation in Adobe Captivate 8 are Responsive and Scalable simulations for mobile-device learning. These both create an output of HTML5 so you don’t have to worry about them working on mobile devices. This means you can finally forget Flash output!

However, it might be a little confusing at first as to which you should create—a Responsive simulation or a Scalable one.

What’s the difference?

Both Responsive and Scalable simulations can be used on different devices for your mobile training, but the two are different when it comes to what your end-learner sees and in how you start creating them in Captivate 8.

Scalable Simulation

A Scalable simulation shows your entire captured screen on all three types of devices: computer screen (PC or Mac), tablets and smartphones. The screen is kept intact but just gets smaller for tablets and smartphones. A Scalable simulation is a good choice if you always want your entire screen recording to be seen no matter which device is being used to view your tutorial.

For example, below is the same portion of the simulation as it appears in estimated PC/Mac, tablet size and smartphone.

Once published, you are able to view the entire screen recording in whatever size device window. Above is an example of viewing it on a PC.

Above is an example of how the same simulation would look on a tablet. Notice that the entire screen is still showing.

Above is an example of how the same simulation would look on a smartphone. This is when a learner would start squinting.

Note that when creating a Scalable simulation, you cannot scale it in Preview mode. You will need to Publish it first and then drag your window to different sizes to view how it will look in various mobile devices.

Responsive Simulation

A Responsive simulation allows you to show your entire screen recording for PCs/Macs, a smaller portion of the screen for tablets and an even smaller portion of the screen for smartphones. This is a good choice if a scalable simulation choice is too small to see on a smartphone.

In the screen shots below, you’ll see how different portions of the same screen recording are shown in Preview mode in Captivate 8.

Above you see the entire screen in Preview mode for PCs/Macs.

Above you see the portion of the screen in Preview mode for tablets. Notice that a smaller portion of the screen is shown for tablets.

Above you see the small portion of the screen in Preview mode for smartphones. To smartphone users, this almost looks like a zoomed-in shot. But the good thing is, they can see a very clear portion of the screen (no squinting)!

Starting a Responsive or Scalable Simulation Project

As I mentioned above, you must start your Captivate 8 project differently based on if you want it to be a Responsive simulation or a Scalable one. This is something quite different than what we’ve seen in earlier versions of Captivate.

To start a Scalable simulation project, you can either select “Software Simulation” or “Blank Project” from the New tab. To start a Responsive simulation project, you must first select “Responsive Project” from the New tab.

In either case, after clicking the Create button, you can add your screen recording anywhere in the project by clicking Slides on the menu. It then shows a sub-menu.

Note that “PowerPoint Slide” is unavailable in Responsive projects.

For either Responsive or Scalable simulations, you select “Software Simulation.” Then you would record your simulation just like you have in previous versions of Captivate. After you have recorded your simulation, the workspace is different between Responsive and Scalable projects. Responsive projects display the Primary, Tablet and Smartphone view tabs at the top of the workspace. Scalable simulations do not have this feature. This is why it is important to know which type of simulation you want to use before you start your project.

Above is the workspace for a Responsive project. Notice the Primary, Tablet, and Smartphone views.

Above is the workspace for a Scalable or regular simulation project.

Generating Scalable Software Simulations

To generate scalable HTML5 for your software simulation, when you click Publish, you need to select the “Scalable HTML content” checkbox.

Working with Responsive Simulations

If you have created a Responsive simulation, Captivate 8 allows you to change which portion of the screen you show by dragging the smartphone or tablet window to the area that you want to show.

Above I’ve moved the Mobile view (Smartphone) window to exactly where I want it.

Having the three views also allows you to change other things on the screen (like objects and text) so that it can be totally different between PCs and smartphones for example.

Summary and Hints

If you understand the output of both Responsive and Scalable simulations, it is easier to start a new project in the right way. This is a change for Adobe Captivate users who have used previous versions. Before, you didn’t have to think about output very much before starting your projects; now you do.

If you want to show the entire portion of your screen recording, no matter which type of device the learner is using, use a Scalable project (Software Simulation or Blank Project).

If you want to show different portions of the screen based on device, use a Responsive project.

From a Responsive project, you can go from a Responsive output to a Scalable output. However, you cannot do the reverse of going from a Software Simulation project to a Responsive project output. If you are in a Responsive project, there is a checkbox in Properties called “Use portion of background Image” that is selected by default for Tablet and Smartphone views. If you deselect that on either the Tablet or Smartphone view, the full screen recording is shown, which makes it like a scalable project.

Above you see the “Use portion of background Image” checkbox is checked by default for the Mobile (Smartphone) view.

I love these outputs that you can find in Adobe Captivate 8. We can now easily create software simulations for mobile devices. The future is now.

 

Adobe Captivate 8 is a product of Adobe Systems, Inc. For more information, see their website at http://www.adobe.com/captivate.