Escape the Room Reflection
I have played escape the room games a couple of times before, so the setting was not completely new for me. The experience this time was a little different since all of my teammates were really into games, which cannot be said about both of my previous games.
I think what I always find interesting in an escape the room activity is the fact that everyone can be helpful with the process of solving the puzzles at hand. This time’s was no exception. For example, one of the puzzles looked similar to some problems on the IQ tests. Personally, I jumped the gun by assuming it will work like the IQ problems, but it didn’t. The solution was much simpler, but was it not for my team member who tried the simpler way, it would have taken me much longer.
The puzzle I mentioned above also allowed me to see the different ways by which people think about problems. I’m personally used to shooting for an answer and working my way from there. Of course this is not the only way, and might not be the best one, but I tend to forget about my strategy until I work with someone else who uses a different way of solving problems just as has happened during escape the room.
Another thing that I loved about the activity was its usefulness in team building. During this class, we all got the chance to work closely together, so I felt like we had the chance of exploring each other’s strengths. Playing escape the room highlighted a lot of these strengths again. It showed that some of us were very observant of what’s around them, it showed that others were careful thinkers or that some just wanted to try things as fast as possible. All of these are traits that would probably help a lot in a team.
What I found interesting is that no weaknesses get highlighted! I’m not sure why that is the case, but I think that it is because everyone is just focused on getting out, and they will remember the choices that helped them with doing so, but not necessarily the choices that did not workout. This is a really important aspect of escape the room for team building because it could give confidence to the team members to just try whatever they think would work rather than focusing on the perfect shot. Doing something wrong would not necessarily be counted against them, but would help in driving things in the right direction.
Another observation that was nice to see is the dissolving of any sort of hierarchy between the players. In my case, I got to play with my teacher assistant within our team. Our interaction with him were always within the classroom context, so taking the time to have an interaction that required everyone’s effort was helpful in making the hierarchy disappear.
