Mystery Room: Engaging Marginalized Youth through an Immersive Experience
Cory Trent Brolliar, Katherine Margaret Williamson, Michael Allan Oswald, Paige Nicole Cox · Digital WPI · 2018
We worked with Banksia Gardens Community Services to develop a mystery room program for their after-school homework club.A mystery room is an immersive, hands-on experience where participants complete a series of activities to complete a target objective, and our team created one with the goal of heightening student engagement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) concepts.To do this, we researched student engagement and expert processes for designing mystery rooms, and conducted observations of the participants' interests and soft skills.Based on this, we developed an iterative design process to create a fantasy mystery room experience.We then piloted our room with eleven participants, which we assessed through observation and post-experience focus groups.During the experience, most of the participants were actively listening and responding to the actors.A majority of them were working together to solve puzzles and for the most part believed that they were in a new world.From this, we determined that mystery rooms provide an engaging experience for students, spark their interest in learning, and that incorporating a brief post-experience lesson would further solidify academic concepts. Student Engagement: A Stepping Stone for the FutureEngagement, or what Lombard and Ditton call "engrossment in mediated experiences" 1 , is a crucial element in educational environments.Traditional, or passive, learning -a method where a professor gives instruction to their students in the form of a lecture and students take notes on the materials 2sometimes makes it difficult for students to feel engaged and to reach the levels of motivation necessary for a path to graduation and further success.This need to engage learners is especially prevalent in Broadmeadows, a disadvantaged community within Victoria, Australia, where 74% of students do not graduate from high school.This is extreme, especially when compared to the national statistics where only 24% of students throughout Australia as a whole do not graduate high school.3 Fortunately, many educators have begun to integrate active methods of education into their curricula.2 Active learning, defined by Felder and Brent, is anything course-related that all students in a class session are called upon to do other than simply watching a lecture and taking notes.4 Research has found that active learning successfully improves student engagement 5 , which motivates students to persevere in their learning.Perseverance will make it much more likely that they reach the ultimate goal of graduating high school and finding employment.