Presented By: Ellen Klinger, The Ohio State University

Game based learning and assessment offers opportunities for students to engage in active and authentic learning and for real world evaluation of student skills. Escape rooms are one such game-based method, where students must make informed choices using various pieces of data to reach an intended goal. Escape rooms can help meet learning objectives and goals in classroom situations and can be used as assessments, active learning or peer interactive activities. An obvious real world parallel to the format of an escape room is that of insect pest management; can a grower make choices that allow them to escape costly economic insect damage in their system within a limited timeframe? In this poster, creation of an IPM escape room assessment used in an upper-level Insect Pest Management course is dissected to show how aligning the activity with course learning objectives and how creation of a robust scenario is key to activity effectiveness. In addition, using 2 years of experience, shortcomings of the escape room model are highlighted.