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If you are looking for activities for online schools, MysterU is the one for you! In addition to us always telling you that it is an innovative way to teach, we also bring to you the testimony of this school!
But let’s start with what MysterU is. It is a new and innovative reality that mixes technology and the digital world with learning features such as puzzles and riddles, making the cases perfect for activities for online schools.
Here, players will fully identify with the story being told to them, and to solve the case they will have to pass several tests; these consist, as we said, of puzzles in the open web for the Cook and the Black Tulip cases, while on specific and direct sites for the Ghosts case.
This distinction is made primarily to protect young players in this escape room for children, who can start having fun as early as 6 on their own. However, we recommend that children play it together with their parents so they can experience this as a family game!
If we have intrigued you and you would like to try them, you only need to buy them in our store by clicking here! No one ever said learning has to be boring, which is why MysterU cases are perfect as activities for online schools.
Today, to tell you why MysterU cases are great for activities for online schools, we bring you the interview we conducted with Dr. Masiar Babazadeh, lecturer-researcher, and Dr. Luca Botturi, professor at SUPSI’s Department of Education and Learning (University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland).
For an international research project called School Break, they have been concerned with studying the effect of escape rooms in education. Specifically, they asked whether it is possible to use the escape room format for activities for online schools at the elementary and middle school levels.
Not only that, but they also wondered about other aspects of activities for online schools such as:
Starting from this project and these questions, several courses were born at the levels of bachelor’s, master’s degree, and continuing education in SUPSI, on educational escape rooms and how to carry out this activity for online schools.
We were contacted by MysterU under the advice of a special education teacher who had tried one of the experiences proposed by MysterU and was aware of our research project. The contact was very helpful to us as we were already envisioning the use of educational escape rooms in an online format. Thus, we were able to discuss and employ some of your experiences in our courses.
During our courses, it is important to play didactic escape rooms so that participants can have the experience and thus be able to pass it on to their students by designing their own. This has unfortunately been lacking due to the pandemic, which has forced us to proceed remotely.
The solution we found was to play with the class using some MysterU experiences. In particular, we played the Black Tulip case, which works well for middle school teachers, and the Ghosts case, for elementary school teachers. Such an approach can be innovative even for those who are not familiar with escape rooms and can give many ideas about the possibility of using digital technology in the classroom and thus for activities for online schools.
The experiences went well, in total we played I think three-four iterations for the various courses we take. Being distance learning, we organized the class into groups of 3-4 participants who would call in (via Teams) to play together. In some cases, one participant would share the screen and the others would follow; in other cases, participants would each play on their own screen but always remain connected via audio.
People really liked the MysterU experiences, particularly liked the idea of using the web as an environment for hiding clues and puzzles that have to be solved by putting together the “puzzle pieces” that are gradually collected.
Overall, they were all good times; participants really enjoyed playing the escape room and discussing it afterward. It was very interesting to gather participants’ feedback and their perspectives on using a platform like MysterU in the classroom in an educational format.
Certainly, the ability to play remotely all in parallel is a nice strength, it allows you to play something together but remain at a distance. Also, it differs from other types of online escape rooms, its strength is to exploit the web to hide clues by immersing oneself in the role of a secret agent who, by necessity, has to investigate by searching and digging through the web.
It has been very helpful to us in obviating the problem of experimenting with remote escape rooms, especially for those participants who had never played an escape room before. In other contexts, where a remote approach will be necessary, we will probably reintroduce MysterU as a solution.
We thank Dr. Masiar Babazadeh and Dr. Luca Botturi so much for choosing us and for this interview where they have reported their considerations of the use of MysterU for educational purposes as activities for online schools.
So, if you are a school and looking for more ideas for activities for online schools, we recommend that you also read this article of ours. To contact us for future collaboration, which can be customized as well, click here!
In the meantime, however, you can also go and pay a visit to the MsyterU store by clicking here and choose from one of our products! Check out this article, and enjoy!
