Escaping The Ordinary Ii: Blending The Virtual and Physical Worlds With Hybrid Escape Rooms

At the MOBTS Oceania conference in 2024, the author demonstrated an activity that had been developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to enable students to remotely experience an educational escape room. With face-to-face teaching returning in the post-COVID era, it is crucial to find ways to keep students engaged in the classroom. Adapting the online escape room activity into a ‘hybrid escape room’ that incorporates elements of the physical classroom and the online environment provides a substantially more immersive experience. Attendees at this session will participate in the hybrid escape room activity and discuss ways of developing similar activities to suit their own curricula. There will also be discussion of aspects such as how to upscale the activity to a large cohort of students with multiple teaching staff, and how to deal with students who are reluctant to engage with the activity.