Digital Challenges: Unlock the Escape Room Erasmus Project

Project Title

Digital Challenges: Unlock the Escape Room

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

Digital Challenges: Unlock the Escape Room! (DigiCh) is a project to foster mutual learnings on digital citizenship among six secondary schools from Spain, Turkey, Finland, Netherlands, Italy and Poland.

We tackle a common issue: rapid evolution of technology makes learning methodologies and teacher training obsolete quickly, and inclusion has a rising digital dimension. There are few pedagogical resources to support digital citizenship classroom practice, so grassroots attempts are usually the only, limited way and teachers need to proactively build their own capacities. An added issue is that none of our educational systems provide in teacher’s provisions a cross-border dimension even its global features, or keep pace with developing new technologies. Some pupils are more often engaged in “progressive” uses of technology involving collaborative and inquiry-based activities, while some others receive more traditional practice or drilling on devices.

The online universe permeates classroom limits, disregarding local, regional or national frontiers, especially while a global language like English facilitates interactions. Digital lives and experiences are now a part of the school experience and it is our duty to introduce this new reality into our educational practice. The new digitalized world poses new challenges for the modern citizen, and the youth of today need solid skills to build digital resilience regarding how to separate the real information/content from the fake information/content, and even on how to hold up a self-worth that is not based only on clicks and likes. No matter our country or culture of origin, it affects equally all of our students owning a digital device connected to a data provider.

Neuroscience proves that the human brain undergoes changes between the ages of 15 and 25 accountable for mood swings, risk-taking, impulsive behavior, over-sensitivity, and irresponsible behavior. This makes teenagers especially exposed to online threats. Secondary schools can also be considered as high-fueled venues for online hate speech. Recent cases of online defamation towards our schools as organizations and teachers as professionals of some public relevance stand alongside perennial misuse of mobiles among pupils, and even among their families too. Growing use of digital devices for online teaching while coronavirus alert is in force makes this still more relevant.

Recent known challenges related to defamation and harassment online campaigns towards our schools and our educational community (pupils, teachers, families, school leaders…) raise the need to network to achieve results that wouldn’t be possible to reach alone in our countries. International collaboration may enrich the educational experience as we come from countries featuring very different digital skills in our schools and staff and levels of introduction in the educational use of ICT.

DigiCh will reach its objectives by using Phenomenon Learning (PhL), where pupils study a topic through collaborative settings in a holistic approach instead of in a subject-based approach. A gamified structure based in Escape Room concept complements Phenomenal Learning approach to make learning activities more enjoyable. They are complex games to solve collaboratively problems and tasks involving all 21st Century Skills. Gamified learning elements such as immediate feedback for completing the challenges successfully or social interactions while playing in a group modifies the brain’s reward and pleasure center and improves learning by the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine.

We are using as a connecting thread a ficticious character, the Monster of Fame, feeding from likes and forwards in social media. To keep it under control it has to be locked in a box by international teams of teenagers. On completion of every learning activity, students get codes that will lock the monster until the next stage of the project.
A digital version of the escape room will be supported by an Augmented Reality platform, may be Spatial, Metaverse, Blippar or some better option that would enable the game in several settings. Teachers will collaborate to plan different versions of educational escape rooms, to create questions, answers and to manage activities.

DigiCh also uses the Escape Room concept to assess learning achievement.
DigiCh aims to benefit our educational communities by exchanges of pedagogical good practice and ways to tackle digital challenges and malicious actions. We expect this project to have a permanent impact on our schools, pupils and educational community.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 197246 Eur

Project Coordinator

Institut El Palau & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Cukurova Sanayi Ortaokulu
• ISTITUTO COMPRENSIVO GIOVANNI XXIII
• Oulunkylän yhteiskoulu
• X Liceum Ogolnoksztalcace w Gdansku
• Stichting voor Christelijk VO Culemborg e.o.