 Mae'n dwi'n gobeithio'n gwybod wedi cyfnod o'i sylweddau sydd wedi gweithio'n gobeithio yma ar Manchester Metropolitan University yn clywed o'r Gweithreth Llywodraeth Llywodraeth Cymru, ac mae'r amser o'i tynnu sydd wedi'i tynnu cymaint ar y canfion am yr hyn sydd arfer y gallu gwirioneddau oherwydd yn gallu cyfnod oherwydd sydd wedi cyfnod o'r strydol. Dwi'n cael ei bod, mae'r fan erioed yn dwylau mewn gwneud. Mae'n eu ffordd yn y gallu gwneud ffygen, a'r unrhyw o'r ffordd. Rwy'n ei wneud i ddweud eich hun o'r unig ac i'r unrhyw i unrhyw o'r unig. Felly, rwyf wedi bod yn rhael am ddechrau gweld yn y ddweud, Dwi'n gwybod i'r cyfnod i'r byw sy'n gwybod i'r blwyddyn yn hynny, ond rydyn ni'n ei wneud i'r studium ac allan o'r byw yn gwneud y gallai ymddangas, dyma'r gwahanol i'r bwysig ar gyfer allan. Rydym ni'n meddwl ymddangos o'r bwysig ar gyfer allan o'r byw. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r bwysig. Felly, fel rhaid i'r bwysig fyddion i'r bwysig, i'r bwysig i'r bwysig, rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r bwysig. I worry that we're not really giving students that kind of opportunity to accept and laud positive failure. All that I've been thinking about is in terms of my work around games and play is a construct called the magic circle. The idea of the magic circle is that it's a safe space in which you can fail. Video games use this all the time. People play video games because failure is intrinsic in them. You could play a video game and we're going to get it right first time. It would be really boring. It's that cycle of failure, reconstruction, learning through failure that's really important in terms of video games. So I've been thinking for a while about how you could take this kind of learning through failure model and apply it ethically and safely within higher education. A recent other interest of mine is escape rooms. Can I just get a sense of hands of how many people have played in the escape room here? Back off, and how many people know what an escape room is? Who doesn't know what an escape room is? The idea is, and I've seen looks on people's faces of absolute horror, it's in an escape room you and a number of other people, usually two, three or four, are locked in a room, often not really physically locked in, and you have to solve a series of puzzles over the course of an hour or so to get out of the room. I first played this with a bunch of young technologists down in London about four years ago, and all four of us came out going, wow, there's something about the time and the physicality and being locked in a room and having to work with other people and having to collaborate. It was really powerful. Over the last four years there's some really interesting work that's been done around using escape rooms for education. Andrew Walsh at the University of Huddersfield has done some amazing stuff around escape rooms for libraries. Helen Whitehead has done some sort of online escape room work. Liz Cable at Leeds Trinity is absolute master of the field in terms of getting, she has boxes and boxes of escape boxes that I know she carries around in her car and the students absolutely engage with that. Samantha Clark particularly at the University of Coventry is doing some really good theoretical thinking around what might escape rooms for learning look like. That was the kind of original space that I was thinking in, but we worked from 2012 to 2014, I was involved in a project called Magical, which was looking at how we could get children in years 7, 8 and 9 in high school to engage in collaborative learning through digital game making. This really opened my eyes to the kind of power of collaboration and in terms of skills such as problem solving, collaborative learning, teamwork, creativity and just kind of lateral thinking and thinking outside the box. Now whilst the outcomes of that project were genuinely positive, one of the big issues that we had was around the technical provider, the ability to have game making software, the ability then to take that software and use it on different machines, it's basically a lot of technical issues. For me that's when it all came together of thinking about what can we do to learn through failure, how could I do something cool with escape rooms and how could we build on the principles of learning through game making that we developed in this previous project. It came from a chance conversation with one of our ex-students who happens to be a senior maths teacher at a local school and me saying I'd really like to do something with escape rooms and failure and him saying well I've got a bunch of really good sixth formers and they're doing enrichment projects, they've got an enrichment week and we don't know what to do with them. So I forgot to use my slides. Excellent, I've just got two inverted in talking that I forgot to take to actually use my slides. So that's my slide that's just the point I've just made about failure. So I'll move on from that. So this was talking about the Magical Project. So this is when the Edgescapes project was born and we've actually run it for three years in collaboration with a high school in Cedle Hulm which is just about five miles south of Manchester. In the second year we got some funding at some Erasmus Plus network funding from a consortium called Learning Games which is really nice because that's given us the opportunity to take some ideas and build on them with international partners. The big problem with it has been fitting it into curriculum. Despite having a senior person in the university who's totally committed to the project because it's with students who are halfway at their AS level year the curriculum by that point is so full that there's very limited spaces in terms of being able to fit in something that's cross-curricular and something that teaches these kind of failure-based skills. So in the first year we had 12 students who were pretty much cherry-picked because it was a bit of an experiment and they developed escape rooms during the two-week enrichment period. In year two, based on feedback from the first time we used a smaller one-week enrichment period. And it worked both times and we got a lot of very good feedback but the issue for me was that it was very much the best students, the brightest and the best with a small cohort we had thrown a lot of resources into it and I was very interested to see whether it was something that could be expanded beyond kind of the best 12 in the school. So based on our funding for the Learning Games project we decided in the final year that we would go for a different model so instead of having it push into an enrichment period we'd run it as an optional work experience type activity one hour a week, over six months and we'd open it up to 40 students so we'd have a much different student demographic and see if we could, which was much more representative of the types of ideas we were looking at. I mean it's all very well to have a model that works very well but if it's not inclusive there's not a great deal of point and what I wanted to talk to today is kind of the ideas and models that came from that and some of the findings of the research that we've done. So this is the sort of model of failure based learning that it was built around with three key areas first being initiation, development and then presentation and the idea of this in the initiation period it's about introducing students to the escape rooms and about giving them the opportunity to build up their teams so we take them to a commercial escape room and play games with them and each of the teams that are going to work together actually go and work through an escape room. We've then developed a kind of training programme which starts with looking at how you design puzzles the different types of puzzles you might use and looking at how you then would go through the steps to put an escape room together. In the first two years we ran this as a single day in the last year we ran this over the course of the first month of the project and getting people together and that's very much about taking time to team build, to scene set and to make sure that students know what they're aiming at. Then we have this kind of failure based development phase and the whole point of getting it in an escape room is that you're designing something for other people and you're never going to get it right first time and that's absolutely fine that's part of an accepted part of the process. That you will have to test it and you'll have to test it over and over again and that seeing how other people interact with your puzzles and with your theme is part of the learning experience. So this cycle of test it, fail it, reflect, revise is absolutely integral and one of the things we say to students is that there will be different phases of it so generally we'll say come up with your theme and then come up with your puzzles, test all of your puzzles and test them again, watch other people doing it get other people to think aloud while they're working through it because what we've found is that teams will come up with something they think is really obvious and people solve it just don't get it or something that they think is really difficult that people solve straight away so that sort of process is absolutely crucial so they'll test it with the teachers they'll test it with other students and other groups and then a couple of times during the period we'll send in people from the university so again I've brought in friends who are game developers or professionals and it's that kind of bringing a professional in and giving them the sort of professional feedback that's been quite key to it. And then finally there's an event that we run the playful learning conference which runs every year in July and for the last three years we've brought these students in giving them conference passes, they've been part of the conference but also they've been running the escape rooms for the delegates at the end of the conference and this has been the really key moment for them at the end of last year we had students going I didn't realise it was a real thing and suddenly they'd stepped up because they'd had this new level of professionalism because there was this professional presentation at the end so while it's absolutely key to this that there isn't kind of an assessment this presentation is the point at which actually you've done all your failing and then you've got a big public celebration at the end and that's been very important for the students Now one of the reasons for going into the physical escape rooms is to get away from the problems that we'd had when we were game building with digital games but actually there are lots and lots of ways that you can build technology into this and it's been quite my opening the way that the students have kind of taken this and run with it themselves so one of these things was using digital puzzles so using various types of electronics so there have been puzzles that have been around unlocking iPads, finding codes and one of the groups in the first year built this amazing electronic box on a circuit tree that you had to plug in three various things at different points that would open the box so lots of creativity in terms of digital as well as physical and mechanical puzzles I was quite surprised in how many of the groups got really creative in terms of scene settings so they put their theme we had one group that had ambient music running at different points along with different puzzles lots of groups that went to a lot of trouble producing videos that would allow people to come to do the scene setting for them so there was a lot of creativity there one of the things that we asked groups to do when people are in the room there has to be a way of monitoring them so we've got groups who've set up go-pros who've set up various camera solutions and ways of getting information so some have used different types of computers or way laptops and tablets and ways of digital ways of getting information to participants on the other example we've had some groups that have had a physical person in the room and used that as a way so it allows you to be as digital as you want equally you can go completely analogue and we've also been quite impressed with the kind of project management tools and different digital tools that students have used in terms of being able to design their room being able to test their room being able to monitor and reset their rooms really quickly a lot of them have done that digitally so what I like about this is it doesn't you could do the whole thing without engaging in digital at all you could make it a very very high tech digital room but it allows groups to engage in the digital as much as little as they want to so for this final year we ran some more structured research around the project so this kind of had three questions and three different types of data that we were looking at so we were interested in student learning and we hypothesised that student learning would be around team building that it would be sorry was that a time thing that it would be around collaboration then it would be around creativity and problem solving so we used a post and pre evaluation now obviously we didn't have control group so the significance that we could get from this was fairly limited anyway but I was interested in whether they things around their confidence in these areas were going to change as it happened what we learnt from this is that students won't fill out a post questionnaire once they've left the project and so we've got very limited data on that but there's some quite interesting qualitative stuff coming out of that too in terms of trying to work out with the student experience did they like it or did they feel that they got out of it we've got quite a lot of rich qualitative data so we've got an RA to come in and interview all of the student groups over the one day of the conference that they came to run their rooms at and that's kind of the analysis that I'm going to talk about here we're also interested in the staff experience so we do have some qualitative data from the three staff members that run the project as well and that's backing up some of the data that I'm going to share with you so we're at the point now of having the interview transcripts and having some of the qualitative data from the pre and a few post questionnaires and we plan to do a detailed both thematic and discourse analysis on it at the moment we've done a very early kind of thematic analysis just to see what the main things have come out and I'm going to share that with you now so in terms of the key findings something that came out this year which didn't really happen in previous years and we should think is to do the size of the cohort is that the whole process of managing failure is not easy so despite the fact that it was always we were very clear with students all the way along that you will not get this right first time you have to accept critical feedback this is part of the process it's about change and iteration and refinement we still on the time, the first time that myself and colleagues went in to give students feedback we got quite a lot of feedback from staff that students had found it quite demotivating because we'd been critical but positive and that they hadn't been used to receiving that kind of feedback now whether that's something to do with how we weren't horrible to them but we were very constructive in terms of this bit isn't really going to work you're going to need to look at that again so I think they hadn't quite been expecting out about this time whereas in previous years they were getting much more close engagement with members of staff because it was over a short period of time so we're really thinking about how we set students up to accept that failure is part of the process and to manage it and to deal with it constructively and that perhaps we need to put more support in around doing that and more preparation for students in terms of this is how how you accept how you learn from the feedback that you're being given that the structure is crucial so coming back very strongly that the time spent in scene setting and doing initial training and support and playing was really key equally the students really really valued the fact that they could come to a public conference at the end and that they were engaging with the general public and what they said at the end was actually we want to go back and do this again can we go and do it to the governors and we want our parents to come in and do it it was the sort of feeling of celebration for them came through very strongly but also the idea of this iterative stage and if anything what we didn't do was perhaps chunk it up more in terms of development because realistically they were having to have it tested 10 times to get something good and I don't think they had the feel for exactly how much of this iteration was going to have to happen so in terms of future work that's something we'll definitely be looking at the middle section needs to be much more structured in terms of the learning outcomes well we didn't gather any evidence on things that we did expect there were some interesting things that came out that we hadn't expected one was very much around the kind of power relationship between the students and their teachers because they got their teachers to play the games this had opened up this new avenue of oh my teacher is doing something that I've made that they can't solve and it really I think in terms of building the students confidence and their ideas of what they could do it was absolutely amazing this came up from lots and lots of the students this feeling of independence as well now this I think we didn't have any evidence of this in the first two years but I think this was in the third year because it was run over such a long period of time that they liked being trusted that they really felt they'd gone off and done a thing and I think also this idea they really got that other people don't think like them and I'm not sure that there'd ever be a chance to sort of see that as obviously is when you're watching somebody try and solve the thing that you've produced and several of them I was talking to I said I just never thought that anyone would think like that and it's really opened my eyes to people are different and if I'm producing a thing there's lots of different takes on it so I think in terms of those learning outcomes we were quite interesting that were coming out from it so words of project going now we've got three universities in the UK who are taking it and going to be using it with their students which is great I'm really interested if anybody else wants to take the model we have a website everything's available online I'd be really interested if anybody else wants to take it and run with it with their students we've received some funding funding from Erasmus Plus so we're going to be running a two year project which will be taking it into schools in six countries to try and sort of embed it my issue with it is I think it's got a lot of potential but it works much better with small groups and high input whereas I think once to make it valuable it needs to be much more accessible to larger groups and how you can then put that into different curricula so we're looking at six different curricula six different countries to see how we can push it forward so thank you very much for listening please contact me if you'd like to know anything about the project my emails there and that's the project website does anybody have any questions? are they constructing escape rooms to explore a certain topic when they started in the first year the colleague that I was working with was a maths teacher and I'm a computer scientist so we were interested in maths and computer science but it turned out that that was adding another layer of complexity that the students were finding it quite hard sometimes to come up with puzzles anyway making them all maths and computer science based wasn't a massive problem but it just ended up that some of them were incredibly complex and required certain prior knowledge which is kind of against the ethos of an escape room so in the previous, in the subsequent years we didn't have any sort of curricula in terms of what the puzzles were about because it was very much about cross-curricular objectives next one I have a question here too I know so there's a couple of questions on the screen which I don't know what I wanted to ask too about being a gamer myself I get very motivated by the random badges that show up on my PS4 which I wasn't necessarily working towards but it would show up and have more of a way to do new things finding new things in the game and I just wondered, given that I see badges everywhere whether you could potentially use badges here not only for motivation in a kind of self-assessment but also in terms of showing the things that the kids and people have learned through failure at a distance outside of the project I think that hadn't occurred to me but now you've said it, it's ringing lots of bells I think part of it was why would the students do it and we'd always said well it's something to tell Uckas about and that we'll give you a letter but actually they'd never come back and ask for that I think by the end of it they've retrospectively kind of enjoyed the experience I think this year because it took so long because they were only doing it for an hour a week there were certain points when it kind of lost its impetus and the staff had to get back in there now I can then see actually if we are putting more of a structure in and we did that around badges that each group has to collect certain badges at certain times that would not only allow you to structure it but it would allow you to see where you were to see the other groups and I think because there were more groups this time the first two years they were all working in the same spaces and there was a lot of competition between the groups we actually ran at this competition gave prizes we didn't do for various logistic reasons in the final year but actually I think being able to see that group's done 10 iterations or that group's done failed 20 times could actually be really major I might come talk to you about that are there any other questions in the room at the time I'll pick up one more if university education was a board game would it be at £27,000 peace puzzle, trivial pursuit or the beginning of a very long game of Monopoly or a bit of each maybe okay I can't see the time but I suspect it's moving onwards and everybody's wanting a bit of lunch so I'm going to stop here thank you for listening I'm around for the whole conference I'm very happy to talk to anyone John Wilson, the CEO at Agenta we're a technology company that focuses on education and learning we build, manage and operate platforms for education for video collaboration externally we prefer to work with what we feel is ethical industries obviously education teaching, learning, healthcare we feel that we can really contribute to these industries by creating exciting platforms easy to use platforms secure platforms that people can utilise what we feel is one of the most important things for Scotland to boost economic growth is investing in rural areas by investing in broadband in these local areas we can attract more talent we can attract more companies and we can drastically improve the delivery of education and learning within these schools, within disparate regions within Scotland