[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 402 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Rachelle O’Brien and Nicola Whitton join me to talk about playful learning and virtual escape rooms.

[00:00:15] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:24] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. Joining me on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed are two guests, Rachelle O’Brien and Nicola Whitton.

Rachelle is a senior Digital Learning Designer at Durham University. She’s worked in education for over 10 years as an independent consultant in higher education and in the commercial sector. Her research interests include play, games, digital education, and inclusion. Rachelle’s current work focuses on the potential of using puzzles in higher education as teaching, learning, and as assessment tools.

Nicola Whitton is Director of the Durham Centre for Academic Development and Professor of Education at Durham University. Her research focuses on play in adulthood, in particular, games and learning in the context of higher education and the potential of play in learning, research, and academic practice. Her most recent projects have focused on the potential of escape room design for learning. Rachelle O’Brien and Nicola Whitton, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:03] Nicola Whitton: Thank you [crosstalk]

[00:02:03] Rachelle O’Brien: Thank you very much.

[00:02:05] Bonni: Let’s start by talking about play, and I’ll begin, Nic, with you. Could you tell me about some aspect of your life where you see playful problem solving coming into the mix?

[00:02:18] Nicola: Wow, well, my background is very much researching all types of play and video games. That’s very much where my mindset is a lot of the time. I’m a director of a department at Durham University, and I try very much to bring playful ideas into working with the staff. We try and look at playful ways of getting staff to engage with each other.

For example, before the pandemic, one of the things that I did was get rid of staff away days because they didn’t seem to work, and they were quite artificial.

We replaced them with playful volunteering instead. We’d go out and we do something useful in the community for a day. Over Christmas, we spent a day packing up food for disadvantaged families and playing party games. On summer, we spent a day clearing up churchyards and playing hide and seek in the bushes. That seems to be a very nice and playful way of getting to know each other and doing what people do on away days but without necessarily having the formality or the artificiality of it.

[00:03:21] Bonni: Oh, I love this. I think sometimes we would call these retreats, but they often are neither retreats nor always getting the things that we want out of that. Oh, thank you for sharing this with me. This gives me an idea for some of the work that I do at my university. I love this idea. Thank you so much. Rachelle, how about for you? What comes to mind when you think about, in your life, just playful problem-solving in general?

[00:03:42] Rachelle: I’m going to take this slightly differently. I’m lefthanded. All of my life, I’ve done things, as my mom would say, back-to-front. I eat with my cutlery in the wrong hand, I tend to go the opposite way to the way that I should go. I’ve had that in my mind. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that I apply that to work that I do. What that means is that if somebody uses something and there’s specific guidance and you are supposed to use it in that way, I tend to do it the wrong way around, which, for a little while, wasn’t a great thing.

Over time, I’ve come to realize that you can actually find different, sometimes better routes to solve your problem by doing it differently from the way that you’re told to. I guess, basically, I deviate, and I’m blaming that on being lefthanded. That’s the summary.

[00:04:37] Bonni: [laughs] Oh, that’s so delightful. It’s just tangentially related to when I first started learning about some of the ways that people approach instructional design. This is such an early learning. It probably might seem overly simplistic to some, but it’s such a vivid memory for me. A lot of at that time I was teaching skills and things that would have a specific order. If you want to accomplish this task, then you need to do these things or whatever.

An important element that came out of that was, don’t just show people what it should look like. When you’re done, this is what this thing should look like, but also, this is what it doesn’t look like, to do that exact opposite thing that you’re describing there as an important way of helping people be able to navigate things, and it’s just something that I hadn’t really attended to very much at that time in my teaching and really created a whole new avenue for me to think because I don’t know that that necessarily comes very naturally to me to think that way, but I like to build it in and just be able to ask those questions of that.

That’s really helpful. To that end, we’re going to be looking, specifically, in this episode, about one aspect of play. Before we get there, I’d like to just have you each share a little bit about when we talk about that play can be a way of actively constructing or understanding what that means to each of you and how you see that play out. Let’s begin, this time, with Rachelle. When we talk about actively constructing our understanding, what does that mean to you, and some ways you see it play out?

[00:06:16] Rachelle: I guess, given my last answer, this may not be surprising, and it’s something that I think Nic can come in on a bit more, but failure is the first thing that comes to mind with that. Being open to put yourself in a position to try something and potentially fail and treat the failure as the end goal, which might sound strange, one thing that I struggle with is decision-making.

Quite often, I will make decisions by failing at things because then it takes that decision off the table. I guess, I use that kind of thing to actively construct the understanding of the thing that I want, which again, it might seem really upside down, but hopefully, that answers it.

[00:07:03] Bonni: No. In fact, when this episode airs, a very recent episode will have been from Audrey Watters talking about both her research and her book called Teaching Machines. To remind people who may not have listened to that episode, the early teaching machines were designed to fear failure. You want to make sure that people get all these answers right as we go along the way.

Then I have been introduced to cognitive psychologists who would really stress the opposite of that. In fact, I remember, so frequently, Robert Bjork, who was on the podcast many, many moons ago, who has this wonderful quote that says, “Forgetting is the friend of learning.” That’s always stuck with me, although, ironically, his name didn’t always stick with me, and I was standing in front of a few hundred people and got it wrong.

Speaking of it, it was like a lived-out experience of I’ve never forgotten his name since then. Forgetting really is the friend of learning such that when we can not take ourselves so seriously. I tried, at the time, to be like, “People don’t expect you to remember every single name? [laughs] There’s way too much pressure to put on yourself.” When I was doing it in response to someone’s question, it wasn’t like I hadn’t failed at preparing for the presentation that day or what have you.

Even if I had, to have the least of expectation for myself that somehow at every minute of the day I’m supposed to be able to have perfect recall, which would be too high of an expectation to have. Yes, forgetting is the friend of learning and the ways in which the struggle and the ways in which the failure really can contribute to that. Nic, for you, what comes to mind when you think about some of the ways in which we actively construct our understanding as learners and some of the ways that helps us?

[00:08:49] Nicola: For me, it comes down to this idea called magic circle. I don’t know if that’s something you’ve come across before. It comes from game studies and has been picked up by people that are in play and learning. The idea of magic circle is that when you start to play with somebody or other people, you have this contract. If you’re using an actual game like chess, then you agree to abide by the rules of game, and it’s a formal structure.

Also, when, for example, you are bantering with friends in the pub or you see children playing games, it’s an agreement by everyone who is in the magic circle to abide by the rules of that other space. Actually, what I’m really interested in is how you can build those for learning because, actually, that’s really powerful. As Rachelle said, the ability to fail in a space that what happens in the circle stays in the circle that it doesn’t matter because if you look at video games, for example, video games are designed to fail, but they would be really boring if they didn’t.

Actually, as Rachelle said, the point of games is to fail to play. I’m really interested also in this concept by a chap called Bernard Suits, who talks about, “This is where my brain goes, I go … and that’s the best spirit of play. It’s a willingness of people to play and to voluntarily give themselves into the magic circle and into that spirit of play, and for me, that’s a really important thing, that people are prepared to move in, to accept whatever arbitrary rules of the game and that they don’t mind if they fail, and actually if they fail, they celebrate that, and they try again. It’s that kind of attitude of play, regardless of what people are actually playing, that’s really powerful.

[00:10:38] Bonni: We’re going to look now specifically at just one aspect of play that we might bring into our teaching, and that has to do– We’re going to be going specifically to virtual escape rooms, but I think before we get there, we got to start with just escape rooms in general. Who would like to share a little bit about what an escape room is in case no one’s ever heard of it and a little bit of how it might be applied in different contexts?

[00:11:01] Rachelle: An escape room, it tends to be an activity that is planned and it has various challenges within it. I’m going to try and set the scene for you because I think that’s probably the easiest way to describe it. Imagine you and a group of friends get sent into a room and get locked in there. Once you’re in this room, the only challenge you have is to get out.

You don’t necessarily know how to get out, but you know that there’s going to be clues around the room, you know that you’ve got a time limit, and you know that your goal is to get out. Escape rooms tend to consist of a series of different tasks or challenges or puzzles, and you will have to solve them to reveal other clues that will essentially lead you to escaping, and that is the goal.

The intention is that it’s time-limited, usually, which adds pressure. It tends to be something that’s done in a group. It is something that you can do on your own, but it’s also much more fun when you’re trying to figure out who can communicate under pressure and how well they can do it. In short, that’s what an escape room is.

[00:12:11] Bonni: Have either or both of you participated in an escape room before?

[00:12:16] Rachelle: Many.

[00:12:17] Bonni: Rache, how many?

[00:12:18] Rachelle: I don’t know about you, Nic.

[00:12:20] Nicola: Probably upwards of 100, I think. I remember that when they first came, there was one in London, and it just came up on my Facebook feed a couple of days ago from about seven years ago that myself and some colleagues, we’re all from different bits of Britain, but we all interplay academically. We met up in London to try this new thing called the escape room, and we came out of it an hour later having got out with about 30 seconds to spare, just going, “That was unlike anything we’d ever done before.”

We immediately tried to book in again, and obviously, we couldn’t because it was like a three-month waiting list. We all came out, and we sat there and went, “There’s got to be potential for that for learning” because it was so engaging and we had to collaborate, and we had to think out of the box, and we had to try things, and it was very exciting, and there was lots of emotions going on. It just was something very unlike any sort of game or education experience we’ve had before.

[00:13:19] Bonni: I haven’t ever participated in an escape room, but I have done the opposite of one where there’s a series of lockboxes that are nested inside of each other and got to speak at a conference once and experience one. I found it– I liked it because I think I get a little afraid. The idea of being locked in is way less appealing than trying to get inside of a box, but it was really fun. It also was hard to do with people that I didn’t know very well because I did feel a little bit perhaps just the imposter syndrome or what have you of just not smart enough because some of it, it really is challenging.

I think it’s helpful because it does break on the walls and think about it in different ways that you might contribute. It’s not always going to be from what we might typically think of cognitive abilities or what have you. It was fun, but it’s a little bit intimidating and so how nice when they can be fun and then, therefore, become more inclusive, which I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit more. Now, Rachelle, would you tell us a little bit? We’ve heard about escape rooms. Would you talk about virtual escape rooms and how they differ from ones that occur in a physical place?

[00:14:28] Rachelle: Sure. I think the only difference is that you don’t physically go anywhere. It tends to be on a screen, and it tends to involve you needing to move through a series of tasks. I don’t know if this is the right point to bring this in, really, but one of the reasons that escape rooms really stood out to me is because I immediately saw the way in which they could apply to learning.

Escape rooms apply very similarly to an active learning-type experience. About I’d say maybe six months ago, having been playing with escape rooms and locking students in them virtually and physically sometimes, I realized that you can constructively align escape rooms pretty easily because you have an outcome, which tends to be, solve the puzzles and escape. You have a series of activities, which lead you to an assessment, and then that assessment lets you escape.

I think having that realization made me see that it was a lot easier to communicate with other people how this is something that can work in education and also have other people understand the logic behind it. I think the only complicated factor in escape rooms is the logic it takes to build them, and if you can uncomplicate that, then it’s just a fun activity to develop and also to involve students in or staff depending on who it is that you’re working with. That’s virtual escape rooms.

[00:16:07] Bonni: One of my colleagues who really has gotten into virtual escape rooms, her name is Julie Wilson, and she teaches in our nursing program, and she has built lots of them and has befriended people that also do that same work in the discipline at other universities. What I have really appreciated that I’ve discovered from her is that at least as far as I can tell from her experience, this is one of the unique games and playful activities where you could have them do it as a group like you mentioned, Rachelle.

That’s the goal, would be that it happens most of the time in her classes in a synchronous way, as in people are joining virtually and doing these kinds of problem-solvings together, but if she does have someone who, for whatever reason, missed that opportunity, at least in her cases, she is able to have person progress at a later date on their own independently and not miss out a lot on the learning benefits other than the collaboration that would have occurred.

I think the other thing, at least that, again, I’m just gleaning from her experience, I’ve not played these in my classes, but that at least as far as I can tell, it helps make that failure a little bit more palatable because it’s just one of those assessments that it’s just, you finished it. If you didn’t get the things right along the way, you can backtrack and get that “Okay, I failed at that part. I didn’t get that correct” and then be able to still reach that ending successfully.

Therefore, you’re not being graded, every little thing. “You’ve lost points because you got one thing wrong, or you misunderstood a question.” It takes a little bit of that pressure away, which I think is really, really helpful. Before we talk about making them versus playing them, I just wanted to see if you have anything to add of what we’ve been talking about specific to virtual escape rooms.

[00:17:59] Rachelle: I think nursing is a really, really great example because a lot of medical education, it requires problem-based learning, but it’s really difficult to make authentic, and that’s where simulation comes in really helpfully. I think escape rooms can actually provide that simulated experience. I’ve seen a couple as well from universities specifically around nursing, where they’ve had a patient and a patient is, I don’t know, having a seizure, for example, and you have to then use the escape room to decode what’s happening and find out what it is that is on his OBS that you can see that may be indicating what the cause of the seizure is.

You have to decode the information in that way and then the end result would be that you hopefully help them. What you’re teaching in that situation is how to identify problems that are around the room, but you can then use a reflection or a discussion to have a conversation about, “Well, okay, how does this relate to literature? How do we relate this to the things that you need to know in order to get a medical registration?” It’s been really interesting for me to see that perspective as well.

[00:19:17] Bonni: I’m glad that you brought that up because it goes to the crux of, I was just assuming that she was using it as a review of vocabulary terms. I know that in a lot of the STEM fields, there’s just such a voracious amount of terms they have to learn, and to make that a little bit more palatable might be the way, and then she very gently was like, “I do that sometimes, but that’s not the real–” the benefits that she saw from that.

That really is helpful to make that distinction between just reviewing seemingly disparate vocabulary words versus actually having it be more authentic and applied in that way.

Nic, what can you tell us before we look a little bit more about virtual escape rooms, just about escape rooms in general, making them versus playing them, and some of the benefits to each one of those?

[00:20:08] Nicola: I think as I said when my colleagues came out of the escape room, we started brainstorming what it could be used for. I think that there’s obvious skills in terms of like I said and getting to know one another, collaboration, communication, teamwork, problem-solving. I think that’s the obvious thing. I think the problem with, particularly the UK school curriculum and to some extent, the UK higher education curriculum is there’s not a lot of space for those transferable skills.

I was looking out for projects to get involved with and ended up meeting a secondary teacher at a conference. The two of us ended up both just chatting about what we could do with escape rooms because he was very interested in them. We ended up running a three-year project with one of the local schools at the university where I used to work. This was moving away from what we learn by playing in the escape room to what we learn by building an escape room, so it was picking up on some of those ideas.

We run a conference every summer, and we wanted to run some live escape rooms in the conference. What we did was we worked with– We did it over three years, and we built up. Within the first year, it was 12 students … Now, that would be 17, 18-year-olds. I’m not quite sure how it translates to the US. They did it over a two-week period. Essentially, they were put into groups, they were given a brief.

They were given a bit of budget to buy stuff, and they were told that they had to run a live room per day of the conference. One of the things that I’m really interested in is how you assess play because play, by its very nature … assessment. I think that starts to just change the nature of play through evoking not … but actually going back to the authentic assessment, actually coming and running your escape room in a live conference … was the best real-life assessment they could run.

We had a system. We spent a day with them upfront. We took these play escape rooms, we did a whole day training with them, and then we had a system where they had to do various review points. This, again, was to embed the whole failure-based learning because particularly by the time the students get to 17, 18, in the UK, they’re looking at their final exams, and there’s no space for failure the final exams. You either pass or you don’t, whereas this was getting them to do something and design a game.

Any game designer will tell you that the first one you design won’t work. It’ll be messed up, other people don’t understand, so you’ve got to get feedback and design again and design again. We had this iterative process that the students just had to learn … and then they had to test again and test again. One of the things that were really interesting to me that we found out at the end of it, I should say that the students were amazing, and the games they produced were amazing.

The best feedback that we got from them is they loved watching their teachers play their games because it absolutely changed the power dynamic that they’ve produced something that their teachers couldn’t solve. The teachers loved it because they were getting to play games, and the students just watched their teachers struggle. I think in terms of confidence and in terms of just the highlight or the change of their worldview is really powerful.

[00:23:26] Bonni: Well, if we were going to build a virtual escape room, can we talk a little bit about how we might go about doing it just from a practical standpoint, what would be some of the steps? I realized we won’t get all into it. I can certainly link to some videos that would show people step by step. Any thoughts to guide us as far as creating one?

[00:23:45] Nicola: Again, I will say I don’t have a great deal of experience in finding them. I think one point, while Rachelle’s thinking how of an answer, is that they don’t necessarily have to be high-tech. As I said, I’ve played a lot of different ones since lockdown. One of my favorites was actually in both two books. They’re two copies … but you have to get them as a pair.

My friend, who lives in Leicester, and I played them together. Essentially, you do it over Zoom and one of you has somewhat one information in your book, one has it in another, and you’re not allowed to actually show them the page. Actually, it is virtual, you’re at a distance and it doesn’t necessarily have to be digital. I think for me, that’s one of the most powerful ones I’ve played.

[00:24:30] Bonni: Rachelle, what comes to mind as far as guiding us on how do we create a virtual escape room?

[00:24:36] Rachelle: I think one of the key starting points is to think about what you actually want to achieve. This is a really difficult one, and it’s something that I’ve blogged about quite openly because creating something is really exciting. Like Nic was saying about failure and about iteration, it’s really really tempting to just make the best thing ever and then to not know where to stop.

The way that I approach it and the rule of thumb that I recommend is to have an idea that you can explain in a sentence. If it goes beyond that, then it’s likely to be too complicated. The reason I say that is just because it’s so easy to add complexity here, but it’s really difficult to take it away, so start simple, that’s the first thing. I think another really important thing, and this is specifically with an escape room, is to have a narrative or a backstory.

You really want people to be engaged and to find that intrinsic motivation. The way to do that is to have them needing to achieve something. If you can tie that to a backstory, then that’s even better. An example I can give of this, this was back before the pandemic started and I was, I think crazy is the right word, crazy enough to deliver a conference presentation and a dual-mode, what that means is with people physically in a room and online at the same time.

I did it using an escape room, and I used the escape room to teach people how to use Microsoft Teams. That sounds really complicated. I realize this, and I know I’ve just said, keep it to a sentence. The mascot for the conference was a Gingerbread Man. I created this escape room that taught people how to use a piece of software. Essentially, the Gingerbread Man was going to be put in an oven, unless you could figure out how to get him out of the oven.

Each of the rooms was, well, is the Gingerbread Man here? Is this how you rescue him? It was to rescue the Gingerbread Man. It probably sounds really silly and quite childish, but just having that really simple narrative, I was able to tie it together. What I then did was I looked at, what kind of things do people need to know? I think this is relevant, irrespective of what your subject is.

Choose a couple of things that you really want people to know and plan your puzzles around them. For me in this situation, it was Microsoft Teams. I wanted people to know how to make a call, and I wanted people to know how to send the message. They had challenges that required them to make a call and, in completing that challenge, they’d had to make the call, which meant they’ve learned how to do it and that by making the call, they found somebody who gave them the answer, which let them unlock their next room.

I think keeping it as simple as possible, thinking about your narrative and your backstory, thinking about the kind of tasks that you want people to do, and thinking about the end goal. I think a really important aspect of this, especially if you’re doing it virtually, is having time and space for reflection afterwards. They tend to be quite fast-paced, which is something that Nic’s touched on, and really exciting and engaging for some people.

If you don’t give that space for reflection, it can feel quite flat at the end because you’re really excited, and you’ve escaped, and then there’s nothing else. What you can find is you can have really rich conversations afterwards, and you could discuss things like how people felt during it. Look at the emotional side of it. I think as a facilitator or as somebody who is helping people to go through escape rooms, and I think this is my absolute favorite thing about them and the reason that I’m so encouraged to do them so often, there’s so many surprises that you discover that you don’t expect.

I think this is just the best thing. You’ve got absolutely no idea how people are going to approach these tasks that you’ve set. If you are there facilitating them and you watch them trying to solve problems, you quite often will watch and you’ll think, “Okay, that’s not how I planned that problem to be solved.” What that will do is open up a door to how somebody thinks about it differently.

I think that in itself is absolutely fascinating and brilliant. That is what really encourages me to make these things. It’s those surprising discoveries that you don’t necessarily plan for and how that then changes the conversation. I think this leads into discovery learning a little bit as well. Hopefully, that gives a bit of an oversight or an insight into how to get started and what to think about.

[00:29:36] Bonni: It’s so fun to get inside your mind a little bit as the designer of this experience and to hear about it from that viewpoint. As I consider, a lot of times at conferences like this, you’re talking about, at least in my experience, pretty formal people, people who may not just love admitting failure or may not love admitting that they don’t already know Microsoft Teams inside and out and could teach it … to create that more playful thing, but that also tied into the broader conference because I think sometimes if we put too many layers on things, I think about my own.

I’m not great at coming up with the backstory, so I’m learning from you sharing about this experience of “Oh, but it tied into the broader theme of it.” By the way, side note, that’s often how we might even be able to, in some cases, get our proposals accepted to be able to present if we’re able to show how we are tying into the broader theme of the conference and have people see that we recognize that in our work and just to bring in a little bit of playfulness, a bit of informality but you stressed, Rachelle, having that time for reflection so that if there are those who are not excited about the playful aspects, “Tick-tock, I got somewhere to be,” wanting just more of “Let’s get down to brass tacks here, let’s get down to tangible ways I’m going to take,” those people aren’t forgotten.

They have an opportunity to reflect a little bit on what they learned, what they experienced, what emerged, and some of that you can plan out, Rachelle, but a lot of it, you can’t. You’ve created a space in which those [crosstak] surprises, you acknowledge them, and then it helps make it that much more authentic, what it is that they experienced, that much more valuable because you’ve left the space for it and you don’t leave it just at the gingerbread characters.

Thank you so much. Nic, before we go on to the recommendations segment, is there anything you would like to add about what Rachelle shared as far as guidance or just anything in general about all of this before we get to those recommendations?

[00:31:38] Nicola: Yes, I guess it’s one point on the guidance. For me, it’s always been a big, big thing to think about, what do you do if people get stuck, and how do you support them? When you start facilitating the escape rooms, it’s really hard just to be quiet and let people get stuck because that’s the, really, important thing that actually with escape rooms where you get a facilitator who gives you the clues too easily stops being fun and … facilitators do that.

Part of it is thinking through how you support people but how you know when people are genuinely stuck. When the stickiness is part of the learning experience, I think for me, that’s the first big one. It’s also how you facilitate without breaking the fourth rule. I remember doing an escape room very early on where if you were stuck, the facilitator would open the door and walk in. The minute they did that, they did break in the game. I was thinking, particularly online, how do you as a facilitator be part of the game, rather than being something that takes people away from the game?

[00:32:41] Bonni: Yes. Some of that also is setting those rules and norms upfront and speaking about them and then sticking to it, like you said.

[00:32:49] Nicola: Once that’s done, you then move into the play space, and try not to break that because I think once you do then have to move that character or get people to move out of the room, you’ve lost some of what you have.

[00:33:03] Bonni: Yes, and that’s us trying to rescue people from failure when, in fact, the whole thing was designed around how important failure can be in the learning process and the struggle and then what they discover about themselves along the way.

[00:33:16] Nicola: The other point that I was going make, an example of what we were talking about before, is around people engaging. I think there will always be people who don’t want to play, particularly with escape rooms, various colleagues I’ve spoken to have just said, “There’s no way you would get me in a room with four other people with the door locked. Just no way, not going to do it, don’t want to play, don’t want to do it. If I need to learn Teams, I’ll get the manual, and I’ll do it that way.”

It’s hard, particularly if you’re enthusiastic about play or an advocate of play, you can’t understand why people wouldn’t want to play. There is also a second that you’re thinking anyone who’s forced to play isn’t playing, so we need to make sure that we don’t force people to play.

[00:33:57] Rachelle: I think that comes into what I mentioned earlier as well about being inclusive. Nic brought up a really important point before about this not needing to be particularly technological. The majority of the virtual escape rooms I’ve developed have used softwares like Microsoft OneNote and Google Forms, and there’s a great tool called ThingLink, which is another free software.

The idea there is that you’ve got as much access as you can possibly give. You’ve got accessibility features built into all of these tools as well. You’re not excluding people from it just because you’re using a specific piece of software. Another thing from an inclusive perspective, and I think this is probably why you need to be quite clever in the design of your tasks, is making sure that there’s something for everybody to engage with or not as they choose.

That is exactly what Nic was saying about people not necessarily wanting to play. Some people are quite happy to sit and watch and see how these situations unfold. Some people don’t even want to be there, that is, giving people choice I think is really, really important and an important part of play as well. From an inclusive perspective, just giving lots of different opportunities for engagement in a way that suits many different people.

[00:35:19] Bonni: Thank you so much. Before the three of us share our recommendations for today’s episode, I want to take just a minute and thank today’s sponsor, and that is TextExpander. TextExpander is both the longest-running sponsor on Teaching in Higher Ed and also happens to be the very first or among the very first things I install on a new computer because I’m so used to the time that it can save me.

It saves me from repetitive typing, little mistakes that I make, and being able to search for answers. How it does that is by taking what they call a snippet, a few characters, something that I can easily remember to type and expands it into something harder to remember, that might be a telephone number or a website or a longer form of text like it might take place in our letter of recommendation.

Sometimes we get a little bit sensitive about, wait, don’t automate things that shouldn’t be automated. To me, what it does is, in the example of a letter of recommendation, frees up the time, the mental energy of how is this supposed to be formatted, and what should I be sure to include in every letter that I write? Then I’m allowed to customize it and free up my time to invest in those things that really ought to be specific to this person who’s asking for a letter of recommendation, just to give one example.

To give one other quick example before I close this sponsor message, I like to save time by typing website links. If I type in L-I-N-K, followed by any series of abbreviations, that’s what I use as my common snippets for websites. L-I-N-K, T-I-H-E, as in Teaching In Higher Ed, automatically expands to https://teachinginhighered.com, saves me a ton of time, and then, again, frees me up to spend time on stuff that is more meaningful and more significant and requiring of customization.

If you head on over to textexpander.com/podcast, you can try out TextExpander and get 20% off of your subscription. Please let them know that you heard about TextExpander from Teaching In Higher Ed. Thanks so much, once again, to TextExpander for sponsoring today’s episode. This is the time in the show where we each get to share recommendations. This time, I wanted to line up with games. I wanted to recommend a game that seems like it is sweeping around the world.

It is a word game, and it is called Wordle. Wordle is a game where you try to guess a five-letter word. There’s a lot of talk around what’s the best five letter word because it’ll tell you, did you get one of the letters right but it’s just in the wrong place, or did you get a letter right and it is in the correct place, and then trying to go from there. You get six tries. It’s a lot of fun and it has a culture behind it in the sense of the guy didn’t want to make it into an app, he’s not selling advertising on the website, which I’m trying to figure out, he must be getting an awful lot of hits.

I don’t know how he’s able to keep that site running, and I’ve never had it be down when I tried to get there. It’s also only offered once per day. You can’t keep going in and binge the Wordle games, they are offered once per day. Once that day passes by, the opportunities are gone for that 24-hour period. I also do want to caution people that I know if you listen to this podcast, you probably care about accessibility and just sharing the way that Wordle shares our scores or how many tries did it take you, it’s going to leave some people out or at the very least really frustrate them because a screen reader would be sharing the emojis, the characters that are made to visually display it.

There’s a website that I’ll link people to, there’s just one. I’ve seen some other options, but the one that I use most frequently is a website where you can just paste in your score and then it translates it, and it’ll say one correct on the first try and two, this way. It creates more text-based opportunities to share your score in a more inclusive way. Then finally, I get such a kick out of thinking about the ways in which things seemingly not related to teaching actually could be.

John Warner wrote a wonderful post as part of his substack, which I recommended in general prior episodes. I just wanted to share this specific one where he talked about Wordle as pedagogy, and I love that, and he’s such a brilliant teacher. I’m going to encourage you to read John Warner’s post where we can find out that we are playing, but we also could use it in a teaching and learning context and learn from it in terms of deconstructing it as a game. Those are my recommendations and I’m going to pass it over, Nic, for yours.

[00:40:23] Nicola: Sure. I’d like to recommend a website that leads to a game, and it’s called Cosy Killer. I can email you the exact website, I can’t remember off the top of my head. Cosy Killer is a subscription set. My husband bought me for my birthday last year, and they offered various different games. I’ll give an example of the one he bought me. In the first pack, I got sent, there was a notebook with the various puzzles and clues, and objects.

You get a new box every month, and as you get the box, the story unfolds. It’s like an escape room and a story over a series of boxes. For me, I love that it’s so tech-free. It was all done through physical objects. There is a website, and you can go in and ask for clues and hints. Actually, there were things like– We got a dollar bill and then a UV light about two months later.

If you put the UV light on the dollar bill, there was a code, and there’s just lots of little artifacts. There’s a wonderful puzzle where you actually got two coins, and there are a lot of circles with letters in them. Depending on if you had used the gold coin or the silver coin, one would fit in, and then you could pick a gold or silver letter. It was just really inventive-level puzzles that unfolded.

Because you have to engage with it for a whole year, again, like Wordle, you can’t binge on it because you have to wait another month for the next episode, and sometimes the puzzles spread over three or four months. I think it was three, it was a bit of an eye-opener, something so cleverly constructed to engage you for so long.

[00:42:04] Bonni: Thank you so much. I love that. Rachelle, how about you? What would you like to recommend?

[00:42:09] Rachelle: I’ve got two recommendations. One is a podcast episode, which my brother actually recommended to me, and I listened to it, and I was really captivated by it. It’s by The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, and it’s Episode 114. The title is How to Fix your Focus and Stop Procrastinating. It’s with Johann Hari, and I highly recommend listening to it. It’s around an hour and a half, and there are some challenging concepts in there, but it’s really quite enlightening.

Yes, that’s the podcast episode. The other thing is a TV show, which I hope is okay. It’s called Magic For Humans, and it’s on Netflix, and it’s with a magician called Justin Willman. The way that I’ll describe this is that there’s magic, there’s comedy, there’s lots of hidden lessons and life-affirming moments, and Justin is great with people, so that’s my other recommendation.

[00:43:10] Bonni: I want to go take in all three of your recommendations right now. Oh, they sound absolutely lovely. Thank you so much for the playful way and that practical way that you brought in these recommendations. Thanks to both of you for being guests on Teaching in Higher Ed, what a delightful conversation it’s been. I’m so looking forward to continuing these conversations together as well.

[00:43:32] Nicola: Well, thank you for inviting Rachelle, and thank you to Rachelle for inviting me.

[00:43:35] Rachelle: Thank you for having us.

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[00:43:39] Bonni: Thanks once again to Rachelle O’Brien and Nicola Whitton for joining me for today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Thanks to all of you for listening today. If you’d like to head on over to the show notes, they are at teachinginhighered.com/402 to get all of the great links that are related to today’s episode. If you’d like to not have to remember to do that, I highly encourage you to head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

If you do that, you will be subscribed to the weekly update where those show notes will come directly into your inbox along with some quotable words and recommendations that don’t show up on the episode. I hope you’ll reach out and stay connected with me and with Teaching in Higher Ed that way. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

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The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.