Creating an interdisciplinary escape room for students’ understanding of interdisciplinarity

Teaching and learning about interdisciplinarity is often a challenge because the theory of interdisciplinary research and collaboration is highly abstract. For example, in our experience as educators, the integration techniques presented in Repko & Szostak (2020) are often difficult to grasp for students, and they cannot apply them easily after theoretical explanation of the techniques. Only when they start to use the techniques, they start to understand what they are and how they can be applied.
We have designed a prototype of an interdisciplinary escape room, as another way of transferring (basic) knowledge about interdisciplinarity, grounded in experiential learning and game-based learning. The idea is that this escape room can function as a first interactive introduction to interdisciplinarity in which students gain understanding of interdisciplinarity in a playful manner. In this escape room we aim to incorporate the different aspects of interdisciplinary research and collaboration such as dealing with diverging perspectives and different disciplinary cultures, the interdependency of interdisciplinary work, and possible ways and techniques to integrate different insights. The escape room is transportable and can be set up in any class room.
We ask you to help us improve our proto-type interdisciplinary escape room, in which students gain knowledge and understanding of what interdisciplinarity entails based on their own experience in the game, which may prove to be more effective than theoretical knowledge transfer. In the solution room we will first ask the participants to participate in the escape room after which we will evaluate the learning potential for students together, and look for improvements that can be made.