Teaching teamwork skills and building effective teams using educational escape rooms

Teamwork skillsets are essential to develop for many careers; however, a reported deficiency of opportunities to develop teamwork skills in undergraduate curricula necessitates the implementation of further initiatives. Additionally, given students’ diverse strengths and perspectives, elucidation of the most essential criteria that instructors should use to build effective teams for these initiatives is essential. In response, we collaborated with a local company to develop and incorporate an educational escape room activity into an undergraduate laboratory course. Limited literature exists about the use of this novel pedagogical tool that requires students to work as a team by combining their unique strengths and perspectives to solve a series of challenges. The educational escape room activity was implemented in a fourth-year laboratory and a mixed methods study approach was used. Findings supported the use of the escape activity to teach teamwork skills and inform the development of effective student teams based on enhanced self-awareness of teamwork strengths. These methods and findings will briefly be discussed during this session. Attendees will also collaborate in small teams while interacting with the escape activity to experience its unique teamwork experience. Additionally, the workshop will discuss how to design relevant escape puzzles that incorporate and sufficiently challenge students’ diverse skillsets