While at ISTE, Learning Counsel News Media and Research co-hosted an adventure like no other breakout at the conference. A professional development exercise not to be missed!
Cisco ran the “Escape Room Trek: Master the Troubling Tech Tribbles in Space” adventure every hour or so during all the days of the conference. Attendees could experience the future of teaching and learning and take home their own tribble. Here’s how it went:
First, attendees learned that the game would be demonstrating a new concept that’s actually very old – the one-room schoolhouse of yesteryear now reimagined and set on a futuristic Star Trek-like Academy on Deck 47 during a Tribble attack. The “cadets,” or students, are studying various subjects and start off their studies in a single room overseen by a House Leader (lead teacher), while other teachers are in various other positions like their offices or prepping labs or classrooms. Those separate meeting spaces would be used as the Trek progressed and were depicted on the floor game board.
Players would be moving according to an advanced AI and networking capability that would put them together with teachers and even an off-world Betazoid in their assigned lessons to learn things towards helping figure out the Tribble problem. The School Intelligent Calendaring being currently beta-tested by schools in Florida in Knowstory.com towards a different workflow of teaching and learning was mentioned as the innovation of the Cisco partnership to help schools evolve their network capabilities and security to arrive at the demonstrated future of the Trek.
A House Leader for the main academy room, cadets in Science, Math, Language and History, plus each subject’s Teacher, an off-world Betazoid being communicated with via Cisco Webex to translate the Tribble language, and extra cadets converging to join small group learning from other areas of the Ship were roles in the Trek.
All players of this unique professional development game first learned about the challenge and were given individual role sheets. Once the Trek started, each cadet would work individually, sometimes intersecting with live teaching and a group of other cadets out in classrooms or labs. Each subject area had to learn something related to the Tribbles which unlocked the answers needed of the whole participating “academy” at the end in order to escape.
There were history lessons which required uploading final essays to “the cloud,” a basketball hoop that ended up having to have tribbles thrown into it. There were math calculations, science experiments, and even video and other resources to visit during the Trek.
All of the hundreds of educators managed to escape the Trek and then stick around to ask a lot of questions about this vision of the future that leans on the past – or consult on which color Tribble to take away.
Learning Counsel and Cisco continue to offer this unique and positive experience as a professional development exercise for select schools and districts looking to model parts or all of their teaching and learning workflow to:
- Manage the teacher shortage
- Meet higher time flexibility demands
- Provide another level of personalization
- Orchestrate a full viable curriculum map
For more information visit these links:
“Student Engagement Because of Your School Model & Brand” Whitepaper
