Educational Storytelling Games for Low-Resource Classrooms
Educational Storytelling Games are puzzle-based cooperative games that students have to work together to solve, which have stemmed from the popular trend of Escape Rooms. However, these games often require significant amount of resources.
The mEducation challenged Dr. Scott Nicholson, who worked as our Escape Games for Education Strategic Advisor from September 2021 to June 2022, to see if he could develop an educational storytelling game for low-resource classrooms where the only thing available was a chalkboard. In response, he has developed the Escape Interactive Fiction (EscapeIF) game system! This game “system” will allow a teacher to develop and run escape games that require nothing but a chalkboard in a classroom, and once created, the games will require very little preparation time to run.
In 2023, we are thrilled to continue to work with Scott and his students on EscapeIF now that he is back as Professor of Game Design and Development at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.
What is EscapeIF?
Check out the video to your left to let Scott explain!
Got Your Own EscapeIF Game?
After you’ve viewed this and worked through the materials below, feel free to submit your game here!
EscapeIF: Math Game Storytelling Workshop Recap
On June 16, 2022, the mEducation Alliance hosted a virtual workshop for educators about using story-based math games in the classroom with Dr. Scott Nicholson.
Scott worked with volunteer Aishwarya Shetty from Education Above All (serving the role of a classroom teacher) and a passionate group of other webinar attendees to use the EscapeIF framework to create a new game-based storyline using a specific skill identified in the Global Proficiency Framework for Mathematics.
Don’t Be So Negative! teaches math operations with negative and positive numbers.
Read the article and watch the video to join this EscapeIF mystery story, where players use their math skills to investigate the company “Footlock” who has been employing robots to manipulate social media metrics without the user’s consent.
You can watch the video of the workshop or read a full recap article HERE.
EscapeIF Resources
EscapeIF Games
Sample Online Game – Experience EscapeIF as a student
Sample EscapeIF Game Script: Perimiter Problems – Combination script and tutorial
EscapeIF System Overview – Basics of the EscapeIF and EscapeIF Advanced System
EscapeIF Creation Guide – In-depth guide for teachers and students creating EscapeIF games
Tourist Transport (Scott Nicholson and Janene Depalo) – Grades 2-4; addition and subtraction of numbers and time
Perimeter Problems (Scott Nicholson) – Grades 4-6; perimeter and area
Hungry Hungry Dinos (Scott Nicholson and Derek Gallacher) – Grades 5-7; fraction math
Just an Average Day (Scott Nicholson and Eric Mukarage) – Grades 8-10; mean, median, mode, outliers
All of these EscapeIF projects are in the Creative Commons! You can keep up with the EscapeIF project through Facebook or contact us at medalliance@meducationalliance.org.
