Digital game-based learning activities are less challenging to create than you might think. You can use IU-approved learning tools to make two types of game-based learning activities—escape rooms and branching scenarios.
With escape rooms, students follow a story built around a set of puzzles. They must answer a puzzle correctly to 'unlock' the room and advance to the next room with a new set of puzzles.
Branching scenarios are narratives that require users to make choices at decision points. Based on that decision, they are presented with new information which leads to a new decision point. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, what you see is determined by the consequences of the last choice that you made.
Escape rooms
Individual students can complete an escape room, but having students work together in groups adds significant benefits. A systematic review of escape rooms in education by Fotaris and Mastoras (2019) found that escape rooms "help learners understand the value of seeing problems from different perspectives, expose them to collaborative teamwork, promote engagement and persistence on task … and facilitate benefits of deep learning through group discussion."
Identify important skills or concepts for the module and incorporate them into the puzzles for the various rooms. Rooms may include videos, slides, or readings that can help students solve the puzzles. Or you may have a set of calculations that they need to complete as the puzzle. If you have multiple questions in a room, you can find a way to combine letters or numbers in the answers to generate a code that is used for the password to unlock the next room. Also be sure to create a story to tie the rooms together.
Microsoft 365's OneNote notebook works well for making escape rooms. Here is an example of an escape room created using OneNote notebook (sign in with your IU login to access it). And here is a video from Southwest Regional Educational Cooperative on how to make an escape room with a OneNote notebook. Note: Make sure to write down the passwords to the rooms. You cannot easily recover these passwords.
Branching Scenarios
Branching scenarios can create an engaging activity or an authentic assessment that asks students to apply information to a realistic scenario.
Making a branching scenario can be very complex. Each possible option in a decision point usually leads to another part of the story and a further a decision point, and so on. Plan your work by mapping the decision points and the narrative in a flow-chart or a storyboard. When you are finished, be sure to test all options in the scenario to make sure that it does what you want.
The Branching Out With Branching Scenarios website from Vanderbilt University is a good basic resource on the topic. And here are a few IU tools you can use to create branching scenarios:
PowerPoint
PowerPoint allows users to jump to a non-sequential slide in a presentation based on a choice that they make. Harnessing this capability allows users to set up branching scenarios with PowerPoint slides. This short video covers the basics of how to make a branching scenario with PowerPoint.
Qualtrics
Qualtrics is primarily a survey tool, but it has features that will jump users to nonsequential parts of a survey based on their answers. You can apply this technology to create decision points in a branching scenario. Here is an example of a branching scenario in Qualtrics.
If this sounds intriguing, learn more by attending "Bring Your Story to Life with Branching Scenarios in Qualtrics," a webinar on March 10th from 1 to 1:50pm ET.
WeVideo
WeVideo (formerly PlayPosit) also has branched learning capabilities. With either a playlist or a single video, you can create interactions that jump to a specific timestamp within a video depending on an answer to a decision point.
WeVideo works with videos created by a user or videos imported from YouTube or Kaltura. Finding a video with a storyline that allows you to jump around according to answers may seem a bit daunting. But there are some creative ways to use this capability.
Here is an example of branching using WeVideo that is built around an algebra problem from a Khan academy video. Depending on the answer, the student either moves to an explanation of the problem that they have missed, or if they are right, they will skip over the explanation and move on to the next problem.
Build these activities so that they are not just a diversion in your class. While novelty can be a fun break, these activities are more impactful when students can check their understanding of your learning objectives and important course content. This will prevent them from dismissing your escape room or your branching scenario as just busywork.
