Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 11 Summer 2019 | Page 47

are room escapes rather than library explorations.
Nicole Scherer’s manual, Do (n’t) panic! A manual
for original library escape room events (2016)
provided a good place to start planning and
thinking about the goal and structure of the
session particularly the idea of working backwards.
A 2017 blog post by Dig-It Games alerted me
to Breakout Edu who have developed toolkits
for educational escape rooms with some of their
games available open source and equipment
available to purchase, which could be worth
considering in developing future activities.
Normally, with induction, I demonstrate how to
use resources, but students would need to work
this out themselves. Would that put them at a
disadvantage? This raised some concern as I did
not want students to feel completely lost, but the
library systems are readily available to access and
with sessions taking place from week five, they
may have developed familiarity with them. On the
plus side, in addition to the higher learning skills,
a task such as this would test and develop skills
a standard library induction would not. A blog
post by Other World Escapes (2018) details why
escape rooms are the best form of team-building
activities and cover skills, such as, communication,
collaboration, creative thinking, problem-solving,
time management and decision making. According
to Prospects (2019) job profile, these are key
skills forensic scientists should possess and ones
students should be interested in developing when
thinking about careers. With sessions taking place
between weeks 5-8, I felt students should have
developed a good working relationship with most
of their peers. How wrong I was…
The Devil is in the Detail
I am not going to talk too much about the puzzles,
as a magician never reveals their secrets, but
I wanted to incorporate cryptic puzzles and
activities, which would be paper based, as opening
a safe would have to be the goal. With four
groups, I used four safes and chose a six-digit
combination, made up from numbers in library
book classmarks and from finding information
in electronic journal articles. I put A3 versions
of journal articles on the wall as clues. This
was an idea I liked from seeing large A1 sized
versions of articles on the walls in the forensic
science department. It was a useful way to relay
information about the mysterious benefactor and
present red herrings to throw teams off track, so
students had to develop theories using evidence
and a process of elimination – again, key skills for
forensic science students (Prospects, 2019).
Escape rooms love using light as puzzles, once
again demonstrated in Nicholson’s (2015) white
paper where this was the third most commonly
used puzzle type – 58% of rooms used light. With
this being a forensic science induction, it made
thematic sense to use black lights, so I wrote
messages and clues in invisible ink – one was the
order for the safe combination. The black lights
were in the room but without batteries. Teams
would need to find batteries before they could use
the lights.
Let the Games Begin!
I ran a trial with my team and as library staff, they
had an advantage over the students since they
know how to use the catalogue and are familiar
with library layout – but they still did not solve
the quest in time. My team suggested a hint
system, which I was initially hesitant about, but
agreed to two hint tickets, which teams could
trade in by asking a specific question (but not the
combination to a safe). Some groups did not know
what to ask, which made the hint ticket redundant
and as I did not want to make it easy for them
that was the only system of help. In hindsight,
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