Puzzle Bus Update — Fall edition
It’s back to school time, and yellow school buses aren’t the only thing pulling up to schools! We’ve been driving the puzzle bus around the Bay Area and letting teachers experience the mobile escape room to think about how they might measure important skills like collaboration in their contexts. We are overjoyed by the amount of excitement and insightful conversation the puzzle bus has stirred up. We’ve also had the opportunity to iterate on our prototype escape room. This summer we got to spend some time finalizing our testing, and synthesizing feedback on our mobile escape room.
Just a few weeks ago, we had a group of educators, leaders, and researchers from the Summit Public Schools network come down to the Stanford d.school and check out the puzzle bus, as well as some of the assessment resources we’ve created. Along with some d.schoolers, we had a half day workshop where we explored experiential learning through escape rooms, and ways of evaluating those hard-to-measure skills like communication and collaboration. We co-generated some amazing ideas! Some highlights include a way of having students self-evaluate their experience during an escape room before the debrief. There might be tremendous value in having students track their own emotional social/personal experience through a journey map. We love this idea because it goes beyond looking at what what collaboration looks like, it pushes to have students examine what collaboration feels like. These types of learning experiences could have lasting impact on how students see themselves as collaborators, and can help identify strengths and areas for improvement.
We also generated several opportunities to make our observation matrix even better, such as creating symbols to allow teachers to record observations more quickly and easily. We’re also considering developing more training around implementing the debrief to further support educators. We look forward to prototyping new ideas for the puzzle bus experience, as well as more resources to help educators think differently about education.
As we move forward into the year we’d love to continue testing our new resources — so if you’re interested please be in touch. Also, if you’re an educator interested in running an escape room in your school, email me! I’ld love to hear from you and get to nerd out!