The Agro_Edu games project celebrated its first blended meeting (a mixture between offline and online attendants) after a myriad of online encounters with colleagues being used to seeing one-another in little frames that shrink, expand and are replaced by screen sharing.
The partner organizations meet in Athens, Greece during 11-14 April with the end of testing with internal staff and external evaluators the 5 Escape Rooms and 1 Card Game they had previously developed within the framework of the Agro_Edu games project. In addition, on the last day, one more escape room was developed based on previous research on agriculture sectors of the participating countries.
The internal staff of the partner organizations had previously abstained from reviewing the escape room material, as were the external evaluators “kept in the dark”, in order to be able to go through the challenges with a fresh mind and place themselves in the shoes of the project’s target group (meaning by only following the instructions of the game master). And that worked well! High spirits, team work and (sometimes over) enthusiasm and competitiveness were present during the testing of all escape room.
At the end of each-one of them an evaluation session was carried from the present and online attendants where improvement areas were identified on how to enhance the learning dimension, adapt difficulty level of the challenges and ensure its understandability after the translation in all the languages of the participating countries. The external evaluators particularly enriched the session with the insights based on their professional background.
After all the escape rooms were tested and the adrenaline was forced back to its original level by the unarguable power of Greek expresso, a quiet time for creativity came. Fostered by the beautiful and inspiring setting of ChallEdu’s office, between winds of brainstorming, storytelling, getting stuck and back on the road again, a new baby Escape Room was born.
And at the moment we cannot say more.
But you know what they say about babies, they grow hourly!