#17 Testing Findings

ANALYSIS/SYNTHESIS: What did you learn from the the testing session and how are your discoveries informing your final revisions?

The escape room set up before any testing.

Testing Set Up

Our team came in at around 10:30 AM, 45 minutes before class to set up our escape room experience. This became a little bit of a time crunch as we scrambled to fill in gaps in our understanding of how to set up and making sure every teammate got a chance to be the facilitator and understood each of the cues involved in the Wizard of Oz sections of this experience.

Once the set up was completed, with seconds to spare, our team rushed to class to begin testing. Our team was divided into two halves Nick and Carol being team 1 and Wenqing and myself being team 2. With 4, 15 minute testing slots our team needed to run the experiments and then quickly set up for the next team without revealing the answers to any of the puzzles. While this was certainly a frantic experience it was incredibly rewarding and we were able to find a number of insights.

Team Financial Literacy frantically resetting before the next team comes.

Findings:

Finding 1: A need to balance both fun and learning.

After running these tests and discussing our findings it became clear that on the whole our learners were excited to participate in the escape room. While they continued to be engaged throughout the entire testing time we remained unsure if the learners were retaining the information that was being conveyed to them. For this reason we decided to carry out one of our initial design ideas of creating a takeaway sheet of the information covered in the escape room. Through this we hope to help facilitate further reflection from our learners. We also decided to create an onboarding survey for learners so that we could assess their knowledge of budgeting going into the room. In doing so we hope to be able to glean further insights on the next round of testing.

Players entering blocks into a fake fuse box as a part of a puzzle.

Finding 2: Managing Learner Overwhelm

While learners did have fun in the escape room there were some circumstances where they expressed dissatisfaction. Simple calculations such as addition were easy enough to accomplish, but when we required our learners to calculate percentages they tended to struggle. This then negatively impacted their ability to move to the next part of the room. To address this we decided to remove this as a task but place the percentiles at specific points to give a visual aid in learning. These percentiles are also reinforced by our narrator.

Escape room players attempting to calculate Quinn’s budget.

Finding 3: Refining the Escape Room Experience

As was previously mentioned, in setting up and testing this escape room our team was able to find a number of ways to make the experience run more smoothly. Learners needed to find receipts as part of a puzzle but there was nothing to indicate whether they had collected all of them or not. This then led to stalling in progress and the facilitator would need to step in to give them hints. While there is nothing wrong with giving hints, this particular point in the experience needed to be more fluid for the momentum of the entire experience. We decided to create areas that indicated how many numbers might be missing so that it gave a tacit clue as to the corresponding number of receipts.

Further areas of polish included finding places to visually reinforce the learnings in the puzzles so that they were more explicit and paired with the narrator's description of them. This is in line with the universal design of learning principle of multiple forms of representation. Our team also decided to refine the slides for simulating the escape rooms mechanisms with notes on cues and combining the sound effect and narrator sound files so that they could all exist within the Google Slides file we were using. In doing this we hoped to make the job of the facilitator easier.

Two participants attempting to solve a clock puzzle.